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Monitoring Intraspecies Competition in a Bacterial Cell Population by Cocultivation of Fluorescently Labelled Strains
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Multi-stable bacterial communities exhibit extreme sensitivity to initial conditions.

Erik S Wright1, Raveena Gupta2, Kalin H Vetsigian3

  • 1Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15219, USA.

FEMS Microbiology Ecology
|May 22, 2021
PubMed
Summary

Microbial communities can exhibit multiple stable states, leading to unpredictable assembly. Even in simple environments, ecological dynamics can result in diverse community compositions due to multi-stability and noise.

Keywords:
StreptomycesLotka–Volterra equationsdynamical modelsmicrobial ecologymulti-stabilitysynthetic community

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Area of Science:

  • Microbial Ecology
  • Community Dynamics
  • Theoretical Ecology

Background:

  • Microbial communities show varied compositions despite similar environments.
  • Multiple alternative stable states are hypothesized but lack experimental support.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To provide experimental evidence for multiple stable states in microbial communities.
  • To investigate the role of bistability and multi-stability in community assembly.

Main Methods:

  • Collected absolute population abundances of soil bacteria (1-4 strains).
  • Analyzed population dynamics in a feast-or-famine environment.
  • Utilized generalized Lotka-Volterra equations for modeling.

Main Results:

  • Observed bistability in pairwise competitions, with a 1:1 ratio separatrix.
  • Demonstrated propagation of bistability to multi-stability in multispecies communities.
  • Showcased unpredictable community assembly due to distinct stable states and ecological noise.

Conclusions:

  • Multi-stability may be a common feature in multispecies microbial communities.
  • Ecological noise and multi-stability contribute to unpredictable community assembly.
  • Generalized Lotka-Volterra models require refinement to capture complex microbial dynamics.