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Competition for fluctuating resources reproduces statistics of species abundance over time across wide-ranging microbiotas

Po-Yi Ho, View ORCID ProfileBenjamin Good, Kerwyn Casey Huang
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.05.13.444061
Po-Yi Ho
1Department of Bioengineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
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Benjamin Good
2Department of Applied Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
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  • ORCID record for Benjamin Good
Kerwyn Casey Huang
1Department of Bioengineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
3Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
4Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, San Francisco, CA 94158
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  • For correspondence: kchuang@stanford.edu
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Abstract

Across diverse microbiotas, species abundances vary in time with distinctive statistical behaviors that appear to generalize across hosts, but the origins and implications of these patterns remain unclear. Here, we show that many of these patterns can be quantitatively recapitulated by a simple class of resource-competition models, in which the metabolic capabilities of different species are randomly drawn from a common statistical ensemble. Our coarse-grained model parametrizes the intrinsic consumer-resource properties of a community using a small number of macroscopic parameters, including the total number of resources, typical resource fluctuations over time, and the average overlap in resource-consumption profiles across species. We elucidate how variation in these parameters affects various time series statistics, enabling macroscopic parameter estimation and comparison across wide-ranging microbiotas, including the human gut, saliva, and vagina, as well as mouse gut and rice. The successful recapitulation of time series statistics across microbiotas suggests that resource competition generally acts as a dominant driver of community dynamics. Our work unifies numerous time series patterns under one model, clarifies their origins, and provides a framework to infer macroscopic parameters of resource competition from longitudinal studies of microbial communities.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Copyright 
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-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted May 14, 2021.
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Competition for fluctuating resources reproduces statistics of species abundance over time across wide-ranging microbiotas
Po-Yi Ho, Benjamin Good, Kerwyn Casey Huang
bioRxiv 2021.05.13.444061; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.05.13.444061
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Competition for fluctuating resources reproduces statistics of species abundance over time across wide-ranging microbiotas
Po-Yi Ho, Benjamin Good, Kerwyn Casey Huang
bioRxiv 2021.05.13.444061; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.05.13.444061

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