Environmental fluctuations reshape an unexpected diversity-disturbance relationship in a microbial community
Name
elife-67175-v2.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.89 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
634794e7e7958a234abdb6611844bbf6
Author(s)
Mancuso, Christopher P
Lee, Hyunseok
Abreu, Clare Isabel
Gore, Jeff
Khalil, Ahmad S
Date Issued
2021
Journal
eLife
Publisher
eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd
Citation
Mancuso, Christopher P, Lee, Hyunseok, Abreu, Clare I, Gore, Jeff and Khalil, Ahmad S. 2021. "Environmental fluctuations reshape an unexpected diversity-disturbance relationship in a microbial community." eLife, 10.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Environmental disturbances have long been theorized to play a significant role in shaping the diversity and composition of ecosystems. However, an inability to specify the characteristics of a disturbance experimentally has produced an inconsistent picture of diversity-disturbance relationships (DDRs). Here, using a high-throughput programmable culture system, we subjected a soil-derived bacterial community to dilution disturbance profiles with different intensities (mean dilution rates), applied either constantly or with fluctuations of different frequencies. We observed an unexpected U-shaped relationship between community diversity and disturbance intensity in the absence of fluctuations. Adding fluctuations increased community diversity and erased the U-shape. All our results are well-captured by a Monod consumer resource model, which also explains how U-shaped DDRs emerge via a novel ‘niche flip’ mechanism. Broadly, our combined experimental and modeling framework demonstrates how distinct features of an environmental disturbance can interact in complex ways to govern ecosystem assembly and offers strategies for reshaping the composition of microbiomes.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.7554/ELIFE.67175
