Community coalescence reveals strong selection and coexistence within species in complex microbial communities
Walton, S. J.; Xu, Q.; Sharma, R.; Gellert, H. R.; Yeh, C.-F.; Cremer, J.; Xue, K. S.; Petrov, D. A.; Good, B. H.
Show abstract
Complex microbial ecosystems harbor extensive intra-species diversity, but the fitness consequences of this genetic variation are poorly understood in community settings. Here we address this question by competing in vitro gut communities derived from different human donors, revealing the emergent fitness differences between conspecific strains as they competed within larger communities. Most pairs of strains experienced strong and context-dependent selection, even when their parent communities were originally selected in the same nutrient environment. However, these fitness differences typically attenuated over time due to biotic interactions within the community, leading to extended coexistence within many species, and competitive exclusion in others. These results support the view that conspecific strains can fulfill distinct ecological roles when competing within a diverse community, even when their genomic diversity exhibits the hallmarks of a single biological species.
Matching journals
The top 4 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.