Oña Leonardo, Shreekar Shryli K, Kost Christian
Department of Ecology, School of Biology/Chemistry, Osnabrück University, 49076 Osnabrück, Germany.
Department of Ecology, School of Biology/Chemistry, Osnabrück University, 49076 Osnabrück, Germany.
Trends Microbiol. 2025 Jun;33(6):619-634. doi: 10.1016/j.tim.2025.01.013. Epub 2025 Mar 5.
The structure and function of microbial communities is shaped by intricate ecological interactions amongst the constituent microorganisms. Thus, a mechanistic understanding of emergent community-level functions requires knowledge on how the architecture of the underlying interaction networks affects these properties. To address this, researchers employ different sequencing-based and experimental approaches to infer the topology of a given network. However, it remains generally unclear which method is best suited for quantifying critical network parameters. Here we provide a comparative overview of different approaches serving this purpose, with particular emphasis on their strengths and weaknesses. In this way, our work can help to guide the design of studies that aim at unraveling structure-function relationships in microbial communities.
微生物群落的结构和功能是由组成微生物之间复杂的生态相互作用所塑造的。因此，要从机制上理解群落水平上出现的功能，就需要了解潜在相互作用网络的架构如何影响这些特性。为了解决这个问题，研究人员采用了不同的基于测序和实验的方法来推断给定网络的拓扑结构。然而，目前普遍不清楚哪种方法最适合量化关键网络参数。在这里，我们对用于此目的的不同方法进行了比较综述，特别强调了它们的优缺点。通过这种方式，我们的工作有助于指导旨在揭示微生物群落结构与功能关系的研究设计。
