Department of Biomedical Engineering, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA.
Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, NC, USA.
Nat Chem Biol. 2022 Apr;18(4):394-402. doi: 10.1038/s41589-021-00961-w. Epub 2022 Feb 10.
Microbial communities inhabit spatial architectures that divide a global environment into isolated or semi-isolated local environments, which leads to the partitioning of a microbial community into a collection of local communities. Despite its ubiquity and great interest in related processes, how and to what extent spatial partitioning affects the structures and dynamics of microbial communities are poorly understood. Using modeling and quantitative experiments with simple and complex microbial communities, we demonstrate that spatial partitioning modulates the community dynamics by altering the local interaction types and global interaction strength. Partitioning promotes the persistence of populations with negative interactions but suppresses those with positive interactions. For a community consisting of populations with both positive and negative interactions, an intermediate level of partitioning maximizes the overall diversity of the community. Our results reveal a general mechanism underlying the maintenance of microbial diversity and have implications for natural and engineered communities.
微生物群落栖息于空间结构中，这些结构将全球环境分隔成孤立或半孤立的局部环境，从而导致微生物群落被分割成一系列局部群落。尽管空间分隔在相关过程中普遍存在且非常重要，但它如何以及在何种程度上影响微生物群落的结构和动态仍知之甚少。利用简单和复杂微生物群落的建模和定量实验，我们证明了空间分隔通过改变局部相互作用类型和全局相互作用强度来调节群落动态。分隔促进了具有负相互作用的种群的持久性，但抑制了具有正相互作用的种群。对于由具有正相互作用和负相互作用的种群组成的群落，中等程度的分隔会最大限度地提高群落的整体多样性。我们的结果揭示了维持微生物多样性的一般机制，并对自然和工程群落具有重要意义。
