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Transient invaders can induce shifts between alternative stable states of microbial communities

View ORCID ProfileDaniel R. Amor, View ORCID ProfileChristoph Ratzke, Jeff Gore
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/659052
Daniel R. Amor
1Physics of Living Systems, Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA
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Christoph Ratzke
1Physics of Living Systems, Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA
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Jeff Gore
1Physics of Living Systems, Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA
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  • For correspondence: gore@mit.edu
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Abstract

Microbial dispersal often leads to the arrival of outsider organisms into ecosystems. When their arrival give rise to successful invasions, outsider species establish within the resident community, which can dramatically alter the ecosystem. Seemingly less influential, the potential impact of unsuccessful invaders that interact only transiently with the community has remained largely ignored. Here, we experimentally demonstrate that such transient invasions can perturb the stability of microbial ecosystems and induce a lasting transition to an alternative stable state, even when the invader species itself does not survive the transition. First, we develop a mechanistic understanding of how environmental changes caused by such transient invaders can drive a community shift in a simple, bistable model system. Beyond this, we show that transient invaders can also induce switches between stable states in more complex communities isolated from natural soil samples. Our results demonstrate that short-term interactions with an invader species can induce lasting shifts in community composition and function.

One Sentence Summary Transient invaders can cause lasting shifts in community composition and function.

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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 June 03, 2019.
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Transient invaders can induce shifts between alternative stable states of microbial communities
Daniel R. Amor, Christoph Ratzke, Jeff Gore
bioRxiv 659052; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/659052
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Transient invaders can induce shifts between alternative stable states of microbial communities
Daniel R. Amor, Christoph Ratzke, Jeff Gore
bioRxiv 659052; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/659052

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