Insights into resource consumption, cross-feeding, system collapse, stability and biodiversity from an artificial ecosystem.

ABSTRACT: Community ecosystems at very different levels of biological organization often have similar properties. Coexistence of multiple species, cross-feeding, biodiversity and fluctuating population dynamics are just a few of the properties that arise in a range of ecological settings. Here we develop a bottom-up model of consumer-resource interactions, in the form of an artificial ecosystem 'number soup', which reflects basic properties of many bacterial and other community ecologies. We demonstrate four key properties of the number soup model: (i) communities self-organize so that all available resources are fully consumed; (ii) reciprocal cross-feeding is a common evolutionary outcome, which evolves in a number of stages, and many transitional species are involved; (iii) the evolved ecosystems

SUBMITTER: Liu Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5310732 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature