"The Structural and Dynamic Determinants of Microbial Community Stability"Clegg, ThomasMicrobial communities are diverse and complex, consisting of many of populations interacting with each other and their environment through networks of resource consumption and exchange. The complexity of these systems makes studying their stability difficult, with previous work either using simplified models to obtain analytical results or constraining system size and complexity in numerical simulations. Here we avoid this problem by developing a general model of microbial community dynamics, allowing us to investigate the fundamental dynamical and structural features of microbial communities that determine their stability. The generalised modelling approach lets us assess stability of microbial system across millions of replicates with variable system size, structure and non-linear functional forms. We first show the key aspects of system dynamics that promote stability such as sensitivity of uptake and by-product formation and the plasticity of metabolism. We then explore the effect of system size revealing a universal scaling of the numbers of consumers and resources in stable systems. Lastly we explore the effect of the structure of the communities showing how stability is affected by the topology of the metabolite uptake and production network. Together these results provide new understanding of stability of microbial systems and a method that can be applied to investigate their other aspects of their stability in the future. |
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