Related papers: Inferring resource competition in microbial commun…
The entanglement of population dynamics, evolution, and adaptive radiation for species competing for resources is studied. For resource harvesting, we modify the model used in Ref. Phys. Rev. Lett. 118 048103 and introduce new resource…
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…
Many studies have been performed to characterize the dynamics and stability of the microbiome across a range of environmental contexts [Costello et al., 2012, Faust et al., 2015]. For example, it is often of interest to identify time…
Microbes produce metabolic resources that are important for cell growth yet leak across membranes into the extracellular environment. Other microbes in the same environment can use these resources and adjust their own metabolic production…
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…
The rich set of interactions between individuals in the society results in complex community structure, capturing highly connected circles of friends, families, or professional cliques in a social network. Thanks to frequent changes in the…
Social foraging is a widespread form of animal foraging in which groups of individuals coordinate their decisions to exploit resources in the environment. Animals show a variety of social structures from egalitarian to hierarchical. In this…
Mutations in a microbial population can increase the frequency of a genotype not only by increasing its exponential growth rate, but also by decreasing its lag time or adjusting the yield (resource efficiency). The contribution of multiple…
Dispersal is an important strategy that allows organisms to locate and exploit favorable habitats. The question arises: given competition in a spatially heterogeneous landscape, what is the optimal rate of dispersal? Continuous population…
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…
The assembly of ecological communities from a pool of species is central to ecology, but the effect of this process on properties of community interaction networks is still largely unknown. Here, we use a systematic analytical framework to…
In apparent contradiction to competition theory, the number of known, co-existing plankton species far exceeds their explicable biodiversity - a discrepancy termed the Paradox of the Plankton. We introduce a new game-theoretic model for…
All life, including cells and artificial protocells, must integrate diverse molecules into a single unit in order to reproduce. Despite expected pressure to evolve a simple system with the fastest replication speed, the mechanism by which…
Two species with similar resource requirements respond in a characteristic way to variations in their habitat -- their abundances rise and fall in concert. We use this idea to learn how bacterial populations in the microbiota respond to…
Mutualistic interactions, where species interact to obtain mutual benefits, constitute an essential component of natural ecosystems. The use of ecological networks to represent the species and their ecological interactions allows the study…
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…
Complex microbial habitats see the spatial competition of different clonal bacterial populations that switch between different phenotypes. Here, we determine the effect of this subpopulation structure on the invasion of one species by…
During the last decades macroecology has identified broad-scale patterns of abundances and diversity of microbial communities and put forward some potential explanations for them. However, these advances are not paralleled by a full…
Quantifying interaction strength between species is of interest in food web studies for understanding population dynamics. Theory has run ahead of experiment in solving equations describing ecological systems (the Lotka-Volterra equations,…
Due to the recent advances in high-throughput sequencing technologies, it becomes possible to directly analyze microbial communities in the human body and in the environment. Knowledge of how microbes interact with each other and form…