ArticleeLife2021
Environmental fluctuations reshape an unexpected diversity-disturbance relationship in a microbial community.
Article in eLife, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
What it found
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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.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Different grazing intensities affect soil nitrogen cycling by altering microbial nitrogen metabolism in alpine wetlands.iScience · 2026Article
- Overriding Bioprocess Perturbations With a Cell-Machine Interface for Reliable Microbial Stress-Response Control.Microbial biotechnology · 2026Article
- Resource-use plasticity governs the causal relationship between traits and community structure in model microbial communities.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Overcoming toxicity: How nonantagonistic microbes manage to thrive in boom-and-bust environments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Life history strategies complement niche partitioning to support the coexistence of closely related Gilliamella species in the bee gut.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Gut microbiota signatures of the three Mexican primate species, including hybrid populations.PloS one · 2025Article
- Biodiversity is enhanced by sequential resource utilization and environmental fluctuations via emergent temporal niches.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Microfluidic approaches in microbial ecology.Lab on a chip · 2024Review
- Disturbance-diversity relationships of microbial communities change based on growth substrate.mSystems · 2024Article
- Searching for Principles of Microbial Ecology Across Levels of Biological Organization.Integrative and comparative biology · 2023Article
- Out of site, out of mind: Changes in feather moss phyllosphere microbiota in mine offsite boreal landscapes.Frontiers in microbiology · 2023Article
- Resistance potential of soil bacterial communities along a biodiversity gradient in forest ecosystems.mLife · 2022Article
- Controlling microbial co-culture based on substrate pulsing can lead to stability through differential fitness advantages.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Net effect of environmental fluctuations in multiple global-change drivers across the tree of life.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Ecological modelling approaches for predicting emergent properties in microbial communities.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Review
- Microbiome assembly predictably shapes diversity across a range of disturbance frequencies in experimental microcosms.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2022Article
- Methods for the directed evolution of biomolecular interactions.Trends in biochemical sciences · 2022Review
- Adaptation of metabolite leakiness leads to symbiotic chemical exchange and to a resilient microbial ecosystem.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Multi-Replicated Enrichment Communities as a Model System in Microbial Ecology.Frontiers in microbiology · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Environmental disturbances have long been theorized to play a significant role in shaping the diversity and composition of ecosystems. However, an inability to specify the characteristics of a disturbance experimentally has produced an inconsistent picture of diversity-disturbance relationships (DDRs). Here, using a high-throughput programmable culture system, we subjected a soil-derived bacterial community to dilution disturbance profiles with different intensities (mean dilution rates), applied either constantly or with fluctuations of different frequencies. We observed an unexpected U-shaped relationship between community diversity and disturbance intensity in the absence of fluctuations. Adding fluctuations increased community diversity and erased the U-shape. All our results are well-captured by a Monod consumer resource model, which also explains how U-shaped DDRs emerge via a novel 'niche flip' mechanism. Broadly, our combined experimental and modeling framework demonstrates how distinct features of an environmental disturbance can interact in complex ways to govern ecosystem assembly and offers strategies for reshaping the composition of microbiomes.
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Registered trials
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.