Multi-stability and the origin of microbial community types


Author: Didier Gonze1, Leo Lahti2,3,4, Jeroen Raes2,3, Karoline Faust2

Affiliation: <sup>1</sup> Department of Chemistry, Unité de Chronobiologie Théorique, Faculté des Sciences CP 231, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Bvd du Triomphe, 1050 Bruxelles, Belgium.

<sup>2</sup> Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Rega Institute, KU Leuven, Campus Gasthuisberg, Leuven, Belgium.

<sup>3</sup> VIB Center for Microbiology, Campus Gasthuisberg, Leuven, Belgium.

<sup>4</sup> Department of Mathematics and Statistics, 20014 University of Turku, Finland.
Conference/Journal: ISME J
Date published: 2017 Oct 1
Other:
 Volume ID: 11   ,  Issue ID: 10   ,  Pages: 2159-2166   ,  Special Notes: doi: 10.1038/ismej.2017.60.   ,  Word Count: 104  
    The study of host-associated microbial community composition has suggested the presence of alternative community types. We discuss three mechanisms that could explain these observations. The most commonly invoked mechanism links community types to a response to environmental change; alternatively, community types were shown to emerge from interactions between members of local communities sampled from a metacommunity. Here, we emphasize multi-stability as a third mechanism, giving rise to different community types in the same environmental conditions. We illustrate with a toy model how multi-stability can generate community types and discuss the consequences of multi-stability for data interpretation.





PMID: 28475180 PMCID: PMC5607358 DOI: 10.1038/ismej.2017.60 



keyword chaos microbiome