Skip to main content
bioRxiv
  • Home
  • About
  • Submit
  • ALERTS / RSS
Advanced Search
New Results

Neutral and niche dynamics in a synthetic microbial community

Nate J Cira, Michael T Pearce, Stephen R Quake
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/107896
Nate J Cira
Stanford University Department of Bioengineering;
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
Michael T Pearce
Stanford University Department of Physics
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
Stephen R Quake
Stanford University Department of Bioengineering;
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
  • For correspondence: quake@stanford.edu
  • Abstract
  • Info/History
  • Metrics
  • Supplementary material
  • Preview PDF
Loading

Abstract

Ecologists debate the relative importance of niche versus neutral processes in understanding biodiversity [1,2]. This debate is especially pertinent to microbial communities, which play crucial roles in biogeochemical cycling [3,4], food production [5], industrial processes [6,7], and human health and disease [8]. Here we created a synthetic microbial community using heritable genetic barcodes and tracked community composition over time across a range of experimental conditions. We show that a transition exists between the neutral and niche regimes, and, consistent with theory, the crossover point depends on factors including immigration, fitness, and population size. We find that diversity declined most rapidly at intermediate population sizes, which can be explained by a tradeoff between replacement by migration and duration of growth. We then ran an experiment where the community underwent abrupt or gradual changes in size, the outcome of which highlights that selecting the correct model is essential to managing diversity. Taken together these results emphasize the importance of including niche effects to obtain realistic models across a wide range of parameters, even in simple systems.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission.
Back to top
PreviousNext
Posted February 12, 2017.
Download PDF

Supplementary Material

Email

Thank you for your interest in spreading the word about bioRxiv.

NOTE: Your email address is requested solely to identify you as the sender of this article.

Enter multiple addresses on separate lines or separate them with commas.
Neutral and niche dynamics in a synthetic microbial community
(Your Name) has forwarded a page to you from bioRxiv
(Your Name) thought you would like to see this page from the bioRxiv website.
Share
Neutral and niche dynamics in a synthetic microbial community
Nate J Cira, Michael T Pearce, Stephen R Quake
bioRxiv 107896; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/107896
Digg logo Reddit logo Twitter logo CiteULike logo Facebook logo Google logo Mendeley logo
Citation Tools
Neutral and niche dynamics in a synthetic microbial community
Nate J Cira, Michael T Pearce, Stephen R Quake
bioRxiv 107896; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/107896

Citation Manager Formats

  • BibTeX
  • Bookends
  • EasyBib
  • EndNote (tagged)
  • EndNote 8 (xml)
  • Medlars
  • Mendeley
  • Papers
  • RefWorks Tagged
  • Ref Manager
  • RIS
  • Zotero
  • Tweet Widget
  • Facebook Like
  • Google Plus One

Subject Area

  • Microbiology
Subject Areas
All Articles
  • Animal Behavior and Cognition (1000)
  • Biochemistry (1494)
  • Bioengineering (948)
  • Bioinformatics (6834)
  • Biophysics (2434)
  • Cancer Biology (1798)
  • Cell Biology (2533)
  • Clinical Trials (106)
  • Developmental Biology (1702)
  • Ecology (2579)
  • Epidemiology (1497)
  • Evolutionary Biology (5032)
  • Genetics (3626)
  • Genomics (4638)
  • Immunology (1177)
  • Microbiology (4256)
  • Molecular Biology (1629)
  • Neuroscience (10820)
  • Paleontology (83)
  • Pathology (240)
  • Pharmacology and Toxicology (409)
  • Physiology (557)
  • Plant Biology (1460)
  • Scientific Communication and Education (412)
  • Synthetic Biology (543)
  • Systems Biology (1882)
  • Zoology (260)