Multi-stability and the origin of microbial community types

The study of host-associated microbial community composition has suggested the presence of alternative community types. We discuss three mechanisms that could explain these observations. The most commonly invoked mechanism links community types to a response to environmental change; alternatively, c...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The ISME Journal 2017-10, Vol.11 (10), p.2159-2166
Main Authors: Gonze, Didier, Lahti, Leo, Raes, Jeroen, Faust, Karoline
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
631/158/1745
631/326/2565
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Community composition
Data interpretation
Ecology
Ecosystem
Environmental changes
Environmental conditions
Evolutionary Biology
Life Sciences
Local communities
Microbial Ecology
Microbial Genetics and Genomics
Microbiology
Microbiomes
Microbiota
Microorganisms
Models, Biological
perspective
Stability
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Summary:The study of host-associated microbial community composition has suggested the presence of alternative community types. We discuss three mechanisms that could explain these observations. The most commonly invoked mechanism links community types to a response to environmental change; alternatively, community types were shown to emerge from interactions between members of local communities sampled from a metacommunity. Here, we emphasize multi-stability as a third mechanism, giving rise to different community types in the same environmental conditions. We illustrate with a toy model how multi-stability can generate community types and discuss the consequences of multi-stability for data interpretation.
ISSN:1751-7362
1751-7370
DOI:10.1038/ismej.2017.60