ArticleeLife2019
Multistability and regime shifts in microbial communities explained by competition for essential nutrients.
Article in eLife, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 papers.
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Who cites it
37 citing papers in PubMed.
- Keystone concept revisited: insights into microbial community dynamics and control.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2026Review
- Fitness advantage of sequential metabolic strategies emerges from community interactions in strongly fluctuating environments.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- The network structure of cross-feeding impacts microbial community diversity under growth-inhibiting stresses.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Minimizing co-growth as a broad predictor of community robustness.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Community state shifts driven by total carbon availability over resource complexity in a synthetic microbial community.ISME communications · 2026Article
- Paradox of the Sub-Plankton: Plausible Mechanisms and Open Problems Underlying Strain-Level Diversity in Microbial Communities.Environmental microbiology · 2025Review
- 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 · 2025Article
- Emergence of alternative stable states in microbial communities undergoing horizontal gene transfer.eLife · 2025Article
- Article
- Siderophore synthetase-receptor gene coevolution reveals habitat- and pathogen-specific bacterial iron interaction networks.Science advances · 2025Article
- Ecosystem stability relies on diversity difference between trophic levels.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Metabolic complexity drives divergence in microbial communities.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Sediment DNA Records the Critical Transition of Bacterial Communities in the Arid Lake.Microbial ecology · 2024Article
- Review
- Review
- Nutrient status changes bacterial interactions in a synthetic community.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2024Article
- From microbiome composition to functional engineering, one step at a time.Microbiology and molecular biology reviews : MMBR · 2023Review
- Statistically learning the functional landscape of microbial communities.Nature ecology & evolution · 2023Article
- Functional convergence in slow-growing microbial communities arises from thermodynamic constraints.The ISME journal · 2023Article
- Evaluation of vaginal microbiome equilibrium states identifies microbial parameters linked to resilience after menses and antibiotic therapy.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Microbial communities routinely have several possible species compositions or community states observed for the same environmental parameters. Changes in these parameters can trigger abrupt and persistent transitions (regime shifts) between such community states. Yet little is known about the main determinants and mechanisms of multistability in microbial communities. Here, we introduce and study a consumer-resource model in which microbes compete for two types of essential nutrients each represented by multiple different metabolites. We adapt game-theoretical methods of the stable matching problem to identify all possible species compositions of such microbial communities. We then classify them by their resilience against three types of perturbations: fluctuations in nutrient supply, invasions by new species, and small changes of abundances of existing ones. We observe multistability and explore an intricate network of regime shifts between stable states in our model. Our results suggest that multistability requires microbial species to have different stoichiometries of essential nutrients. We also find that a balanced nutrient supply promotes multistability and species diversity, yet make individual community states less stable.
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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.