Growth tradeoffs produce complex microbial communities on a single limiting resource
Abstract
The relationship between the dynamics of a community and its constituent pairwise interactions is a fundamental problem in ecology. Higher-order ecological effects beyond pairwise interactions may be key to complex ecosystems, but mechanisms to produce these effects remain poorly understood. Here we show that higher-order effects can arise from variation in multiple microbial growth traits, such as lag times and growth rates, on a single limiting resource with no other interactions. These effects produce a range of ecological phenomena: an unlimited number of strains can exhibit multistability and neutral coexistence, potentially with a single keystone strain; strains that coexist in pairs do not coexist all together; and the champion of all pairwise competitions may not dominate in a mixed community. Since variation in multiple growth traits is ubiquitous in microbial populations due to pleiotropy and non-genetic variation, our results indicate these higher-order effects may also be widespread, especially in laboratory ecology and evolution experiments.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1802.05774,
title = {Growth tradeoffs produce complex microbial communities on a single limiting resource},
author = {Michael Manhart and Eugene I. Shakhnovich},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.05774},
year = {2018}
}