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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…
Microbial communities routinely have several possible species compositions or community states observed for the same environmental parameters. Changes in these parameters can trigger abrupt and persistent transitions (regime shifts) between…
Microbial communities routinely have several alternative stable states observed for the same environmental parameters. Sudden and irreversible transitions between these states make external manipulation of these systems more complicated. To…
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…
Non-equilibrium thermodynamics has long been an area of substantial interest to ecologists because most fundamental biological processes, such as protein synthesis and respiration, are inherently energy-consuming. Microbial communities are…
Understanding the stability of complex communities is a central focus in ecology, many important theoretical advancements have been made to identify drivers of ecological stability. However, previous results often rely on the…
Empirical observations show that ecological communities can have a huge number of coexisting species, also with few or limited number of resources. These ecosystems are characterized by multiple type of interactions, in particular…
Empirical observations show that ecological communities can have a huge number of coexisting species, also with few or limited number of resources. These ecosystems are characterized by multiple type of interactions, in particular…
Experimental studies of microbial communities routinely reveal that they have multiple stable states. While each of these states is generally resilient, certain perturbations such as antibiotics, probiotics and diet shifts, result in…
Dormancy is an essential strategy for microorganisms to cope with environmental stress. However, global ecosystem models typically ignore microbial dormancy, resulting in major model uncertainties. To facilitate the consideration of…
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…
In a wide variety of natural systems, closely-related microbial strains coexist stably, resulting in high levels of fine-scale biodiversity. However, the mechanisms that stabilize this coexistence are not fully understood. Spatial…
Bacteria possess diverse mechanisms to regulate their motility in response to environmental and physiological signals, enabling them to navigate complex habitats and adapt their behavior. Among these mechanisms, interspecies recognition…
Clonal microbes can switch between different phenotypes and recent theoretical work has shown that stochastic switching between these subpopulations can stabilize microbial communities. This phenotypic switching need not be stochastic,…
The processes of ecological interactions, dispersal and mutations shape the dynamics of biological communities, and analogous eco-evolutionary processes acting upon economic entities have been proposed to explain economic change. This…
Mutualistic interactions, where individuals from different species can benefit from each other, are widespread across ecosystems. This study develops a general deterministic model of mutualism involving two populations, assuming that…
Over the past century, nonlinear difference and differential equations have been used to understand conditions for species coexistence. However, these models fail to account for random fluctuations due to demographic and environmental…
Migration between different habitats is ubiquitous among biological populations. In this Letter, we study a simple quasispecies model for evolution in two different habitats, with different fitness landscapes, coupled through one-way…
Living species, ranging from bacteria to animals, exist in environmental conditions that exhibit spatial and temporal heterogeneity which requires them to adapt. Risk-spreading through spontaneous phenotypic variations is a known concept in…
Ecosystems, which are intricate amalgams of biological communities and their surrounding environments, continually evolve under the influence of their myriad interactions. The world is currently facing intensifying environmental…