Competition for fluctuating resources reproduces statistics of species abundance over time across wide-ranging microbiotas
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 macroecological patterns can be quantitatively recapitulated...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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eLife Sciences Publications Ltd
2022-04-01
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| Series: | eLife |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://elifesciences.org/articles/75168 |
| _version_ | 1811236714273832960 |
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| author | Po-Yi Ho Benjamin H Good Kerwyn Casey Huang |
| author_facet | Po-Yi Ho Benjamin H Good Kerwyn Casey Huang |
| author_sort | Po-Yi Ho |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | 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 macroecological patterns can be quantitatively recapitulated by a simple class of consumer-resource models, in which the metabolic capabilities of different species are randomly drawn from a common statistical distribution. Our model parametrizes the consumer-resource properties of a community using only a small number of global parameters, including the total number of resources, typical resource fluctuations over time, and the average overlap in resource-consumption profiles across species. We show that variation in these macroscopic parameters strongly affects the time series statistics generated by the model, and we identify specific sets of global parameters that can recapitulate macroecological patterns across wide-ranging microbiotas, including the human gut, saliva, and vagina, as well as mouse gut and rice, without needing to specify microscopic details of resource consumption. These findings suggest that resource competition may be a dominant driver of community dynamics. Our work unifies numerous time series patterns under a simple model, and provides an accessible framework to infer macroscopic parameters of effective resource competition from longitudinal studies of microbial communities. |
| first_indexed | 2024-04-12T12:12:46Z |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj.art-c2daf2dd6b134701920b3f7e45a0739f |
| institution | Directory Open Access Journal |
| issn | 2050-084X |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-04-12T12:12:46Z |
| publishDate | 2022-04-01 |
| publisher | eLife Sciences Publications Ltd |
| record_format | Article |
| series | eLife |
| spelling | doaj.art-c2daf2dd6b134701920b3f7e45a0739f2022-12-22T03:33:31ZengeLife Sciences Publications LtdeLife2050-084X2022-04-011110.7554/eLife.75168Competition for fluctuating resources reproduces statistics of species abundance over time across wide-ranging microbiotasPo-Yi Ho0Benjamin H Good1https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7757-3347Kerwyn Casey Huang2https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8043-8138Department of Bioengineering, Stanford University, Stanford, United StatesDepartment of Applied Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, United States; Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, San Francisco, United StatesDepartment of Bioengineering, Stanford University, Stanford, United States; Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, San Francisco, United States; Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, United StatesAcross 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 macroecological patterns can be quantitatively recapitulated by a simple class of consumer-resource models, in which the metabolic capabilities of different species are randomly drawn from a common statistical distribution. Our model parametrizes the consumer-resource properties of a community using only a small number of global parameters, including the total number of resources, typical resource fluctuations over time, and the average overlap in resource-consumption profiles across species. We show that variation in these macroscopic parameters strongly affects the time series statistics generated by the model, and we identify specific sets of global parameters that can recapitulate macroecological patterns across wide-ranging microbiotas, including the human gut, saliva, and vagina, as well as mouse gut and rice, without needing to specify microscopic details of resource consumption. These findings suggest that resource competition may be a dominant driver of community dynamics. Our work unifies numerous time series patterns under a simple model, and provides an accessible framework to infer macroscopic parameters of effective resource competition from longitudinal studies of microbial communities.https://elifesciences.org/articles/75168microbiomemacroecological dynamicsresource competitionconsumer-resource modelsTaylor's lawmicrobial ecology |
| spellingShingle | Po-Yi Ho Benjamin H Good Kerwyn Casey Huang Competition for fluctuating resources reproduces statistics of species abundance over time across wide-ranging microbiotas eLife microbiome macroecological dynamics resource competition consumer-resource models Taylor's law microbial ecology |
| title | Competition for fluctuating resources reproduces statistics of species abundance over time across wide-ranging microbiotas |
| title_full | Competition for fluctuating resources reproduces statistics of species abundance over time across wide-ranging microbiotas |
| title_fullStr | Competition for fluctuating resources reproduces statistics of species abundance over time across wide-ranging microbiotas |
| title_full_unstemmed | Competition for fluctuating resources reproduces statistics of species abundance over time across wide-ranging microbiotas |
| title_short | Competition for fluctuating resources reproduces statistics of species abundance over time across wide-ranging microbiotas |
| title_sort | competition for fluctuating resources reproduces statistics of species abundance over time across wide ranging microbiotas |
| topic | microbiome macroecological dynamics resource competition consumer-resource models Taylor's law microbial ecology |
| url | https://elifesciences.org/articles/75168 |
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