Multi-stability and the origin of microbial community types
Author: Didier Gonze1, Leo Lahti2,3,4, Jeroen Raes2,3, Karoline Faust2
Affiliation:
1 Department of Chemistry, Unité de Chronobiologie Théorique, Faculté des Sciences CP 231, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Bvd du Triomphe, 1050 Bruxelles, Belgium.
2 Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Rega Institute, KU Leuven, Campus Gasthuisberg, Leuven, Belgium.
3 VIB Center for Microbiology, Campus Gasthuisberg, Leuven, Belgium.
4 Department of Mathematics and Statistics, 20014 University of Turku, Finland.
Conference/Journal: ISME J
Date published: 2017 Oct 1
Other:
Volume ID: 11 , Issue ID: 10 , Pages: 2159-2166 , Special Notes: doi: 10.1038/ismej.2017.60. , Word Count: 104
The study of host-associated microbial community composition has suggested the presence of alternative community types. We discuss three mechanisms that could explain these observations. The most commonly invoked mechanism links community types to a response to environmental change; alternatively, community types were shown to emerge from interactions between members of local communities sampled from a metacommunity. Here, we emphasize multi-stability as a third mechanism, giving rise to different community types in the same environmental conditions. We illustrate with a toy model how multi-stability can generate community types and discuss the consequences of multi-stability for data interpretation.
PMID: 28475180 PMCID: PMC5607358 DOI: 10.1038/ismej.2017.60
keyword chaos microbiome
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