Emergent simplicity in microbial community assembly
Abstract
Under natural conditions, bacteria form mixed, interacting communities. Understanding how such communities assemble and stabilize is important in a range of contexts, from biotechnological applications to what happens in our guts. Goldford et al. sampled the microbial communities from soil and plants containing hundreds to thousands of sequence variants. The organisms were passaged after culture in low concentrations of single carbon sources and were cross-fed with each other's metabolites; then, the resulting communities were sequenced using 16S ribosomal RNA, and the outcomes were modeled mathematically. The mix of species that survived under steady conditions converged reproducibly to reflect the experimentally imposed conditions rather than the mix of species initially inoculated—although at coarse phylogenetic levels, taxonomic patterns persisted.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Aug 03, 2018
- Source ID
- 10.1126/science.aat1168
Entities
People
- Alicia Sánchez-Gorostiaga
- Alvaro Sanchez
- Daniel Segrè
- Djordje Bajić
- Joshua E Goldford
- Mikhail Tikhonov
- Nanxi Lu
- Pankaj Mehta
- Sylvie Estrela
Organizations
- Boston University
- Harvard University
- National Institutes of Health
- National Science Foundation Office of the Director
- Stanford University
- Yale University