Related papers: Ecology theory disentangles microbial dichotomies
Monod's model describes the growth of microorganisms using a hyperbolic function of extracellular resource concentration. Under fluctuating or limited resource concentrations this model performs poorly against experimental data, motivating…
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…
A classic problem in microbiology is that bacteria display two types of growth behavior when cultured on a mixture of two carbon sources: the two sources are sequentially consumed one after another (diauxie) or they are simultaneously…
Microbial ecosystems are remarkably diverse, stable, and often consist of a balanced mixture of core and peripheral species. Here we propose a conceptual model exhibiting all these emergent properties in quantitative agreement with real…
The dynamics of growth of bacterial populations has been extensively studied for planktonic cells in well-agitated liquid culture, in which all cells have equal access to nutrients. In the real world, bacteria are more likely to live in…
Microbial ecosystems are commonly modeled by fixed interactions between species in steady exponential growth states. However, microbes often modify their environments so strongly that they are forced out of the exponential state into…
The simultaneous growth of multiple microbial species is a problem of fundamental ecological interest. In media containing more than one growth-limiting substrate, multiple species can coexist. The question then arises: Can single-species…
Surveys of microbial biodiversity such as the Earth Microbiome Project (EMP) and the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) have revealed robust ecological patterns across different environments. A major goal in ecology is to leverage these…
Ecosystems are commonly conceptualized as networks of interacting species. However, partitioning natural diversity of organisms into discrete units is notoriously problematic, and mounting experimental evidence raises the intriguing…
Microbes require several complex organic molecules for growth. A species may obtain a required factor by taking up molecules released by other species or by synthesizing the molecule. The patterns of uptake and synthesis set a flow of…
The rapid advancement of environmental sequencing technologies, such as metagenomics, has significantly enhanced our ability to study microbial communities. The eubiotic composition of these communities is crucial for maintaining ecological…
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…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
Microbial communities are ubiquitous in nature and come in a multitude of forms, ranging from communities dominated by a handful of species to communities containing a wide variety of metabolically distinct organisms. This huge range in…
Much of our understanding of ecological and evolutionary mechanisms derives from analysis of low-dimensional models: with few interacting species, or few axes defining "fitness". It is not always clear to what extent the intuition derived…
Biological populations are subject to fluctuating environmental conditions. Different adaptive strategies can allow them to cope with these fluctuations: specialization to one particular environmental condition, adoption of a generalist…
Ecology studies biodiversity in its variety and complexity. It describes how species distribute and perform in response to environmental changes. Ecological processes and structures are highly complex and adaptive. In order to quantify…
Recent work suggests that cross-feeding -- the secretion and consumption of metabolic biproducts by microbes -- is essential for understanding microbial ecology. Yet how cross-feeding and competition combine to give rise to ecosystem-level…
In 1972, Robert May triggered a worldwide research program studying ecological communities using random matrix theory. Yet, it remains unclear if and when we can treat real communities as random ecosystems. Here, we draw on recent progress…
There is a pressing need to better understand how microbial populations respond to antimicrobial drugs, and to find mechanisms to possibly eradicate antimicrobial-resistant cells. The inactivation of antimicrobials by resistant microbes can…