Mortality causes universal changes in microbial community composition

Clare I. Abreu, Jonathan Friedman, Vilhelm L. Andersen Woltz and Jeff Gore ()
Additional contact information
Clare I. Abreu: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Jonathan Friedman: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Vilhelm L. Andersen Woltz: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Jeff Gore: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Nature Communications, 2019, vol. 10, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract All organisms are sensitive to the abiotic environment, and a deteriorating environment can cause extinction. However, survival in a multispecies community depends upon interactions, and some species may even be favored by a harsh environment that impairs others, leading to potentially surprising community transitions as environments deteriorate. Here we combine theory and laboratory microcosms to predict how simple microbial communities will change under added mortality, controlled by varying dilution. We find that in a two-species coculture, increasing mortality favors the faster grower, confirming a theoretical prediction. Furthermore, if the slower grower dominates under low mortality, the outcome can reverse as mortality increases. We find that this tradeoff between growth and competitive ability is prevalent at low dilution, causing outcomes to shift dramatically as dilution increases, and that these two-species shifts propagate to simple multispecies communities. Our results argue that a bottom-up approach can provide insight into how communities change under stress.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09925-0 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:10:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-019-09925-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-09925-0

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().