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Mortality causes universal changes in microbial community composition

Author(s)
Abreu, Clare I.; Andersen Woltz, Vilhelm L.; Gore, Jeff
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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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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 issued
2019-05-09
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/124608
Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Journal
Nature Communications
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Citation
Abreu, Clare I. et al. "Mortality causes universal changes in microbial community composition." Nature Communications 10 (2019): 2120 © 2019 The Author(s)
Version: Final published version
ISSN
2041-1723
Keywords
General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology, General Physics and Astronomy, General Chemistry

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