Evidence map›Paper›PMID 27310530›Full record

ArticleeLife2016

Community-level cohesion without cooperation.

Mikhail Tikhonov

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in eLife, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
37citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

37 citing papers in PubMed.

  1. Article
  2. Article
  3. Article
  4. Competition for shared resources increases dependence on initial population size during coalescence of gut microbial communities.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025
    Article
  5. Article
  6. Article
  7. Article
  8. Article
  9. Article
  10. Article
  11. Article
  12. Article
  13. Top-down and bottom-up cohesiveness in microbial community coalescence.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022
    Article
  14. Closed microbial communities self-organize to persistently cycle carbon.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021
    Article
  15. Article
  16. Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics in Microbial Communities from Spontaneous Fermented Foods.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021
    Article
  17. Article
  18. Directed Evolution of Microbial Communities.Annual review of biophysics · 2021
    Review
  19. Article
  20. Review
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

1 author.

Mikhail TikhonovCenter of Mathematical Sciences and Applications, Harvard University, Cambridge, United States.ORCID 0000-0002-9558-1121

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Recent work draws attention to community-community encounters ('coalescence') as likely an important factor shaping natural ecosystems. This work builds on MacArthur's classic model of competitive coexistence to investigate such community-level competition in a minimal theoretical setting. It is shown that the ability of a species to survive a coalescence event is best predicted by a community-level 'fitness' of its native community rather than the intrinsic performance of the species itself. The model presented here allows formalizing a macroscopic perspective whereby a community harboring organisms at varying abundances becomes equivalent to a single organism expressing genes at different levels. While most natural communities do not satisfy the strict criteria of multicellularity developed by multi-level selection theory, the effective cohesion described here is a generic consequence of resource partitioning, requires no cooperative interactions, and can be expected to be widespread in microbial ecosystems.

Indexed as

EcosystemModels, Biologicalcomputational biologyconsortiacooperationecologymicrobial ecologyniche constructionnoneresource competitionsystems biology

Identifiers

PMID27310530
PMCPMC4946899

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceCC BY
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.