Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 115, Issue 42, Pages E9842-E9848Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1808118115
Keywords
ecology; synthetic biology; microbiology
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program
- Siebel Scholar Fellowship
- Sara Hart Kimball Fellowship as part of Stanford's Graduate Fellowship Program
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration Exobiology Grant [EXO-NNX11AR78G]
- US National Science Foundation [MCB 0546865, OISE 0968421, DGE-114747]
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Ecologists debate the relative importance of selective vs. neutral processes in understanding biodiversity. This debate is especially pertinent to microbial communities, which play crucial roles in areas such as health, disease, industry, and the environment. Here, we created a synthetic microbial community using heritable genetic barcodes and tracked community composition over repeated rounds of subculture with immigration. Consistent with theory, we find a transition exists between neutral and selective regimes, and the crossover point depends on the fraction of immigrants and the magnitude of fitness differences. Neutral models predict an increase in diversity with increased carrying capacity, while our selective model predicts a decrease in diversity. The community here lost diversity with an increase in carrying capacity, highlighting that using the correct model is essential for predicting community response to change. Together, these results emphasize the importance of including selection to obtain realistic models of even simple systems.
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