Metabolic complexity drives divergence in microbial communities.

ABSTRACT: Microbial communities are shaped by the metabolites available in their environment, but the principles that govern whether different communities will converge or diverge in any given condition remain unknown, posing fundamental questions about the feasibility of microbiome engineering. To this end, we studied the longitudinal assembly dynamics of a set of natural microbial communities grown in laboratory conditions of increasing metabolic complexity. We found that different microbial communities tend to become similar to each other when grown in metabolically simple conditions, but diverge in composition as the metabolic complexity of the environment increases, a phenomenon we refer to as the divergence-complexity effect. A comparative analysis of these communities revealed that this diver

SUBMITTER: Silverstein M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10418233 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature