RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Higher Temperatures Generically Favor Slower-Growing Bacterial Species in Multispecies Communities
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 689380
DO 10.1101/689380
A1 Simon Lax
A1 Clare I. Abreu
A1 Jeff Gore
YR 2019
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/07/02/689380.abstract
AB Temperature is among the cardinal environmental variables which determine the composition and function of microbial communities. Many culture-independent studies have characterized communities that are affected by changing temperatures, either due to seasonal cycles1-3, long-term warming4-6, or latitudinal/elevational gradients7-8. However, a predictive understanding of how microbial communities respond to such changes in temperature is still lacking, partly because it is not obvious which aspects of microbial physiology determine whether a species should benefit from temperature alteration. Here, we incorporate how microbial growth rates change with temperature to a modified Lotka-Volterra competition model9, and predict that higher temperatures should generically favor slower-growing species in a bacterial community. We experimentally confirm this prediction in pairwise cocultures assembled from a diverse set of species, and we show that these changes to pairwise outcomes with temperature are also predictive of changing outcomes in three-species communities, suggesting our theory may propagate to more complex assemblages. Our results demonstrate that it is possible to predict how bacterial communities will shift with temperature knowing only the growth rates of the community members. These results provide a testable hypothesis for future studies of more complex, natural communities, and we hope that this work will help bridge the gap between ecological theory and the complex dynamics observed in metagenomic surveys.