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Co-occurring soil bacteria exhibit a robust competitive hierarchy and lack of non-transitive interactions

Logan M. Higgins, Jonathan Friedman, Hao Shen, Jeff Gore
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/175737
Logan M. Higgins
Physics of Living Systems, Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USAMicrobiology Graduate Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA
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Jonathan Friedman
Physics of Living Systems, Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USADepartment of Plant Pathology and Microbiology, Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food, and the Environment, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Rehovot 76100, Israel
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Hao Shen
School of Life Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
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Jeff Gore
Physics of Living Systems, Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA
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Abstract

Microbial communities are typically incredibly diverse, and this diversity is thought to play a key role in community function. However, explaining how this diversity can be maintained is a major challenge in ecology. Temporal fluctuations and spatial structure in the environment likely play a key role, but it has also been suggested that the structure of interactions within the community may act as a stabilizing force for species diversity. In particular, if competitive interactions are non-transitive as in the classic rock-paper-scissors game, they can contribute to the maintenance of species diversity; on the other hand, if they are predominantly hierarchical, any observed diversity must be maintained via other mechanisms. Here, we investigate the network of pairwise competitive interactions in a model community consisting of 20 strains of naturally co-occurring soil bacteria. We find that the interaction network is strongly hierarchical and lacks significant non-transitive motifs, a result that is robust across multiple environments. Moreover, in agreement with recently proposed community assembly rules, the full 20-strain competition resulted in extinction of all but three of the most highly competitive strains, indicating that higher order interactions do not play a major role in structuring this community. The lack of non-transitivity and higher order interactions in vitro indicates that other factors, such as temporal or spatial heterogeneity, must be at play in enabling these strains to coexist in nature.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.
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Posted August 16, 2017.
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Co-occurring soil bacteria exhibit a robust competitive hierarchy and lack of non-transitive interactions
Logan M. Higgins, Jonathan Friedman, Hao Shen, Jeff Gore
bioRxiv 175737; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/175737
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Co-occurring soil bacteria exhibit a robust competitive hierarchy and lack of non-transitive interactions
Logan M. Higgins, Jonathan Friedman, Hao Shen, Jeff Gore
bioRxiv 175737; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/175737

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