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High-order interactions dominate the functional landscape of microbial consortia

bioRxiv, ISSN: 2692-8205
2018
  • 15
    Citations
  • 0
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Metrics Details

  • Citations
    15
    • Citation Indexes
      15
      • CrossRef
        15

Article Description

Understanding the link between community composition and function is a major challenge in microbial ecology, with implications for the management of natural microbiomes and the design of synthetic consortia. For this purpose, it is critical to understand the extent to which community functions and properties can be predicted from species traits and what role is played by complex interactions. Inspired by the study of complex genetic interactions and fitness landscapes, here we have examined how the amylolytic function of combinatorial assemblages of seven starch-degrading soil bacteria depends on the functional contributions from each species and their interactions. Filtering our experimental results through the theory of enzyme kinetics, we show that high-order functional interactions dominate the amylolytic rate of our consortia, even though this function is biochemically simple, redundantly distributed in the community, and additive in the absence of inter-species interactions. As the community grows in size, the contribution of high-order functional interactions grows too, making the community function increasingly unpredictable. We can explain the prevalence of high order effects and their sign from the redundancy of ecological interactions in the network, in particular from redundant facilitation towards a high-performing community member. Our results suggest that even simple functions can be dominated by complex interactions, posing challenges for the predictability and bottom-up engineering of ecosystem function in complex multi-species communities.

Bibliographic Details

Sanchez-Gorostiaga, Alicia; Bajić, Djordje; Osborne, Melisa L.; Poyatos, Juan F.; Sanchez, Alvaro

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology; Agricultural and Biological Sciences; Immunology and Microbiology; Neuroscience; Pharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmaceutics

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