Speaker
Description
During the last decades, macroecology has identified broad-scale patterns of abundances and diversity of microbial communities and put forward some potential explanations for them. However, these advances are not paralleled by a full understanding of the dynamical processes behind them. In particular, abundance fluctuations of different species are found to be correlated, both across time and across communities in metagenomic samples. Reproducing such correlations through appropriate population models remains an open challenge. The present paper tackles this problem and points to species interactions as a necessary mechanism to account for them. Specifically, we discuss several possibilities to include interactions in population models and recognize Lotka–Volterra constants as a successful ansatz \cite{camacho2024sparse, camacho2024nonequilibrium}. For this, we design a Bayesian inference algorithm to extract sets of interaction constants able to reproduce empirical probability distributions of pairwise correlations for diverse biomes. Importantly, the inferred models still reproduce well-known single-species macroecological patterns concerning abundance fluctuations across both species and communities. Endorsed by the agreement with the empirically observed phenomenology, our analyses provide insights into the properties of the networks of microbial interactions, revealing that sparsity is a crucial feature.
Bibliography
@article{camacho2024sparse,
title={Sparse species interactions reproduce abundance correlation patterns in microbial communities},
author={Camacho-Mateu, Jos{\'e} and Lampo, Aniello and Sireci, Matteo and Mu{\~n}oz, Miguel A and Cuesta, Jos{\'e} A},
journal={Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences},
volume={121},
number={5},
pages={e2309575121},
year={2024},
publisher={National Academy of Sciences}
}
@article{camacho2024nonequilibrium,
title={Nonequilibrium microbial dynamics unveil a new macroecological pattern beyond Taylor's law},
author={Camacho-Mateu, Jos{\'e} and Lampo, Aniello and Ares, Sa{\'u}l and Cuesta, Jos{\'e} A},
journal={Physical Review E},
volume={110},
number={4},
pages={044402},
year={2024},
publisher={APS}
}
