Non-additive microbial community responses to environmental complexity.

ABSTRACT: Environmental composition is a major, though poorly understood, determinant of microbiome dynamics. Here we ask whether general principles govern how microbial community growth yield and diversity scale with an increasing number of environmental molecules. By assembling hundreds of synthetic consortia in vitro, we find that growth yield can remain constant or increase in a non-additive manner with environmental complexity. Conversely, taxonomic diversity is often much lower than expected. To better understand these deviations, we formulate metrics for epistatic interactions between environments and use them to compare our results to communities simulated with experimentally-parametrized consumer resource models. We find that key metabolic and ecological factors, including species similarit

SUBMITTER: Pacheco AR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8062479 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature