ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
Resource competition can explain simplicity in microbial community assembly.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 31 papers.
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Who cites it
31 citing papers in PubMed.
- Bacterial degradation of a plant toxin and nutrient competition with commensals trade off to constrain pathogen growth.mSystems · 2026Article
- Soil as a Battlefield and a Reservoir: Linking Soil Components to the Epidemiology of Soilborne Plant Diseases.Microbial ecology · 2026Review
- The network structure of cross-feeding impacts microbial community diversity under growth-inhibiting stresses.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Multiple Mechanisms Required to Predict Grass Community Composition.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Multidimensional Drivers of Phytoplankton Assembly in a Karst Reservoir: Seasonal Dynamics and Regulatory Implications.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Emergent coexistence and the limits of reductionism in ecological communities.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Microbial biotechnology meets ecological theory: a unified framework to design industrial microbial consortia.International microbiology : the official journal of the Spanish Society for Microbiology · 2026Review
- Accurate monitoring of substrate-dependent growth reveals ecotypic differentiation among marine yeasts.ISME communications · 2026Article
- Experimental evolution in an era of molecular manipulation.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2026Review
- Design and application of synthetic human gut microbial communities.Gut microbes · 2025Review
- Coexistence rules for small, antagonistically interacting microbial communities.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Asymmetric interactions and feast-famine cycles drive chaos in microbial populations.Research square · 2025Article
- Variable inhibition of differentApplied and environmental microbiology · 2025Article
- Evolution of One Species Increases Resistance to Invasion in a Simple Synthetic Community.Microbial ecology · 2025Article
- Multispecies Coexistence Emerges From Pairwise Exclusions in Communities With Competitive Hierarchy.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- Competition and cooperation: The plasticity of bacterial interactions across environments.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Linear scaling reveals low-dimensional structure in observable microbial dynamics.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Metabolic ecology of microbiomes: Nutrient competition, host benefits, and community engineering.Cell host & microbe · 2025Review
- Forging the iron-net: Towards a quantitative understanding of microbial communities via siderophore-mediated interactions.Quantitative biology (Beijing, China) · 2025Article
- A data-driven modeling framework for mapping genotypes to synthetic microbial community functions.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Predicting the composition and diversity of communities is a central goal in ecology. While community assembly is considered hard to predict, laboratory microcosms often follow a simple assembly rule based on the outcome of pairwise competitions. This assembly rule predicts that a species that is excluded by another species in pairwise competition cannot survive in a multispecies community with that species. Despite the empirical success of this bottom-up prediction, its mechanistic origin has remained elusive. In this study, we elucidate how this simple pattern in community assembly can emerge from resource competition. Our geometric analysis of a consumer-resource model shows that trio community assembly is always predictable from pairwise outcomes when one species grows faster than another species on every resource. We also identify all possible trio assembly outcomes under three resources and find that only two outcomes violate the assembly rule. Simulations demonstrate that pairwise competitions accurately predict trio assembly with up to 100 resources and the assembly of larger communities containing up to twelve species. We then further demonstrate accurate quantitative prediction of community composition using the harmonic mean of pairwise fractions. Finally, we show that cross-feeding between species does not decrease assembly rule prediction accuracy. Our findings highlight that simple community assembly can emerge even in ecosystems with complex underlying dynamics.
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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.