ArticleNature communications2024
Horizontal gene transfer is predicted to overcome the diversity limit of competing microbial species.
Article in Nature communications, 2024. 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, 43 citations in OpenAlex.
- Animal gut microbes and microbiomes in the 21st century and beyond.Science China. Life sciences · 2026Review
- Synthetic horizontal gene transfer for ecosystem restoration.Biology direct · 2026Article
- Engineering rhizobacterial communities for soil and plant health.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2026Review
- Perturbations shift the composition of bacterial DNA carried by virus-like particles in the murine gut microbiome.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Eco-Geography Reverses Dominant AMR Reservoirs in Klebsiella pneumoniae: Integron-Rich Mobilomes and Cross-Niche Connectivity.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- Diverse Microbial Communities Assemble on Both Recalcitrant and Labile Carbon Sources.Environmental microbiology · 2026Article
- Evaluating ensemble learning approaches for horizontal gene transfer detection.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The interplay between ecological networks drives host-plasmid community dynamics.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- TrIdent - An R package to automate transductomics analysis of virus-like particle mediated DNA mobilization.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Assessing the Ecological Roles of Resistomes within Microbial Communities in Antibiotic-contaminated Ecosystems.Microbial ecology · 2026Review
- Phosphorus availability drives rhizosphere metabolite-microbial community interactions to modulate cucumber susceptibility to Fusarium wilt.Microbiome · 2026Article
- Insights and applications for understanding the allergology, immunology and biotechnology of plant systems.Molecular biology reports · 2026Review
- The trend and potential factors of the longitudinal antimicrobial resistance of Escherichia coli strains in recent decades worldwide.BMC microbiology · 2026Article
- Community conservatism is widespread across microbial phyla and environments.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Population Ecology of Glacier Bacteria from the View of Gene Flow inMicroorganisms · 2026Article
- Large-scale capsid-mediated mobilisation of bacterial genomic DNA in the gut microbiome.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Risk assessment of plant-to-bacterium transgene flow associated with novel small synthetic genome (minisynplastome) platforms for plastid genetic engineering.FEMS microbiology ecology · 2026Article
- Cooperative antibiotic resistance in bacteria: beyond biofilms.Frontiers in microbiology · 2026Review
- Targeting Horizontal Gene Transfer to Combat Antimicrobial Resistance: A Review of Mechanisms, Drivers, and Multi-Omics Strategies.Infection and drug resistance · 2026Review
- The Environmental Lifecycle of Antibiotics and Resistance Genes: Transmission Mechanisms, Challenges, and Control Strategies.Microorganisms · 2025Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Natural microbial ecosystems harbor substantial diversity of competing species. Explaining such diversity is challenging, because in classic theories it is extremely infeasible for a large community of competing species to stably coexist in homogeneous environments. One important aspect mostly overlooked in these theories, however, is that microbes commonly share genetic materials with their neighbors through horizontal gene transfer (HGT), which enables the dynamic change of species growth rates due to the fitness effects of the mobile genetic elements (MGEs). Here, we establish a framework of species competition by accounting for the dynamic gene flow among competing microbes. Combining theoretical derivation and numerical simulations, we show that in many conditions HGT can surprisingly overcome the biodiversity limit predicted by the classic model and allow the coexistence of many competitors, by enabling dynamic neutrality of competing species. In contrast with the static neutrality proposed by previous theories, the diversity maintained by HGT is highly stable against random perturbations of microbial fitness. Our work highlights the importance of considering gene flow when addressing fundamental ecological questions in the world of microbes and has broad implications for the design and engineering of complex microbial consortia.
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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.