Related papers: Robust estimation of microbial diversity in theory…
Extensive research shows that more species-rich assemblages are generally more productive and efficient in resource use than comparable assemblages with fewer species. But the question of how diversity simultaneously affects the wide…
Diversity represents a key concept in ecology, and there are various methods of assessing it. The multitude of diversity indices are quite puzzling and sometimes difficult to compute for a large volume of data. This paper promotes a…
Ecological selection is a major driver of community assembly. Selection is classified as stabilizing when species with intermediate trait values gain the highest reproductive success, whereas selection is considered directional when fitness…
Many natural patterns, such as the distributions of blood particles in a blood sample, proteins on cell surfaces, biological populations in their habitat, galaxies in the universe, the sequence of human genes, and the fitness in…
Communities are ubiquitous in nature and society. Individuals that share common properties often self-organize to form communities. Avoiding the shortages of computation complexity, pre-given information and unstable results in different…
There is a growing awareness of the important roles that microbial communities play in complex biological processes. Modern investigation of these often uses next generation sequencing of metagenomic samples to determine community…
The interactions among the constituent members of a microbial community play a major role in determining the overall behavior of the community and the abundance levels of its members. These interactions can be modeled using a network whose…
The distributions of species lifetimes and species in space are related, since species with good local survival chances have more time to colonize new habitats and species inhabiting large areas have higher chances to survive local…
The theory of community structure is a powerful tool for real networks, which can simplify their topological and functional analysis considerably. However, since community detection methods have random factors and real social networks…
A fundamental goal of microbial ecology is to understand what determines the diversity, stability, and structure of microbial ecosystems. The microbial context poses special conceptual challenges because of the strong mutual influences…
Shannon information has, in the past, been applied to quantify the genetic diversity of many natural populations. Here, we apply the Shannon concept to consecutive generations of alleles as they evolve over time. We suppose a genetic system…
A Bayesian nonparametric approach to the study of species diversity based on choosing a random discrete distribution as a prior model for the unknown relative abundances of species has been recently introduced in Lijoi et al. (2007, 2008).…
Quantitative methods for studying biodiversity have been traditionally rooted in the classical theory of finite frequency tables analysis. However, with the help of modern experimental tools, like high throughput sequencing, we now begin to…
Understanding functional diversity, the range and variability of species' roles and actions within their communities, is key to predicting and preserving the functions that sustain both nature and human well-being. In this paper, we provide…
The availability of high-throughput parallel methods for sequencing microbial communities is increasing our knowledge of the microbial world at an unprecedented rate. Though most attention has focused on determining lower-bounds on the…
The \emph{community}, the assemblage of organisms co-existing in a given space and time, has the potential to become one of the unifying concepts of biology, especially with the advent of high-throughput sequencing experiments that reveal…
The diversity revealed by large scale genomics in microbiology is calling into question long held beliefs about genome stability, evolutionary rate, even the definition of a species. MacArthur and Wilson's theory of insular biogeography…
We consider the problem of estimating the population probability distribution given a finite set of multivariate samples, using the maximum entropy approach. In strict keeping with Jaynes' original definition, our precise formulation of the…
Microbiome-based stratification of healthy individuals into compositional categories, referred to as "community types", holds promise for drastically improving personalized medicine. Despite this potential, the existence of community types…
Microbes are essentially yet convolutedly linked with human lives on the earth. They critically interfere in different physiological processes and thus influence overall health status. Studying microbial species is used to be constrained to…