Neutrality in the Metaorganism.

ABSTRACT: Almost all animals and plants are inhabited by diverse communities of microorganisms, the microbiota, thereby forming an integrated entity, the metaorganism. Natural selection should favor hosts that shape the community composition of these microbes to promote a beneficial host-microbe symbiosis. Indeed, animal hosts often pose selective environments, which only a subset of the environmentally available microbes are able to colonize. How these microbes assemble after colonization to form the complex microbiota is less clear. Neutral models are based on the assumption that the alternatives in microbiota community composition are selectively equivalent and thus entirely shaped by random population dynamics and dispersal. Here, we use the neutral model as a null hypothesis to assess microbiat

SUBMITTER: Sieber M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6583948 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature