Related papers: Inferring resource competition in microbial commun…
Resource competition is a fundamental interaction in natural communities.However little is known about competition in spatial environments where organisms are able to regulate resource distributions. Here, we analyze the competition of two…
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…
Ecosystems frequently display the coexistence of diverse species under resource competition, typically resulting in skewed distributions of rarity and abundance. A potential driver of such coexistence is environmental fluctuations that…
Microbial communities assemble through a complex set of interactions between microbes and their environment, and the resulting metabolic impact on the host ecosystem can be profound. Microbial activity is known to impact human health, plant…
High-throughput sequencing techniques such as metagenomic and metatranscriptomic technologies allow cataloging of functional characteristics of microbial community members as well as their taxonomic identity. Such studies have found that a…
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…
Microbes can affect processes from food production to human health. Such microbes are not isolated, but rather interact with each other and establish connections with their living environments. Understanding these interactions is essential…
The interplay between energy efficiency and evolutionary mechanisms is addressed. One important question is how evolutionary mechanisms can select for the optimised usage of energy in situations where it does not lead to immediate…
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…
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…
Metagenomics has revealed hundreds of bacterial species in almost all microbiota. In a few well-studied cases, bacterial communities have been observed to coordinate their metabolic fluxes. In principle, bacteria can divide tasks to reap…
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…
We derive an analytical approximation for making quantitative predictions for ecological communities as a function of the mean intensity of the inter-specific competition and the species richness. This method, with only a fraction of the…
The dynamics of microbial communities is incredibly complex, determined by competition for metabolic substrates and cross-feeding of byproducts. Species in the community grow by harvesting energy from chemical reactions that transform…
Competitive interactions represent one of the driving forces behind evolution and natural selection in biological and sociological systems. For example, animals in an ecosystem may vie for food or mates; in a market economy, firms may…
Species-rich communities, such as the microbiota or microbial ecosystems, provide key functions for human health and climatic resilience. Increasing effort is being dedicated to design experimental protocols for selecting community-level…
Platforms often host multiple online groups with overlapping topics and members. How can researchers and designers understand how related groups affect each other? Inspired by population ecology, prior research in social computing and…
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 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…
Patterned vegetation is a characteristic feature of many dryland ecosystems. While plant densities on the ecosystem-wide scale are typically low, a spatial self-organisation principle leads to the occurrence of alternating patches of high…