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Species matter for predicting the functioning of evolving microbial communities

View ORCID ProfileTimothy Giles Barraclough
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/666685
Timothy Giles Barraclough
Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, Silwood Park Campus, Ascot, Berkshire SL5 7PY, UK
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  • ORCID record for Timothy Giles Barraclough
  • For correspondence: t.barraclough@imperial.ac.uk
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ABSTRACT

Humans depend on microbial communities for numerous ecosystem services such as global nutrient cycles, plant growth and their digestive health. Yet predicting dynamics and functioning of these complex systems is hard, making interventions to enhance functioning harder still. One simplifying approach is to assume that functioning can be predicted from the set of enzymes present in a community. Alternatively, ecological and evolutionary dynamics of species, which depend on how enzymes are packaged among species, might be vital for predicting community functioning. I investigate these alternatives by extending classical chemostat models of bacterial growth to multiple species that evolve in their use of chemical resources. Ecological interactions emerge from patterns of resource use, which change as species evolve in their allocation of metabolic enzymes. Measures of community functioning derive in turn from metabolite concentrations and bacterial density. Although the model shows considerable functional redundancy, species packaging does matter by introducing constraints on whether enzyme levels can reach optimum levels for the whole system. Evolution can either promote or reduce functioning compared to purely ecological models, depending on the shape of trade-offs in resource use. The model provides baseline theory for interpreting emerging data on evolution and functioning in real bacterial communities.

Footnotes

  • Funding: This work was supported by NERC grant NE/K006215/1, a Leverhulme Trust fellowship and a Visiting Professorship at the University of British Columbia in 2013.

  • The author declares no conflict of 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 4.0 International license.
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Posted June 10, 2019.
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Species matter for predicting the functioning of evolving microbial communities
Timothy Giles Barraclough
bioRxiv 666685; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/666685
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Species matter for predicting the functioning of evolving microbial communities
Timothy Giles Barraclough
bioRxiv 666685; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/666685

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