Community-level cohesion without cooperation.
Recent work draws attention to community-community encounters ('coalescence') as likely an important factor shaping natural ecosystems. This work builds on MacArthur's classic model of competitive coexistence to investigate such community-level competition in a minimal theoretical setting. It is shown that the ability of a species to survive a coalescence event is best predicted by a community-level 'fitness' of its native community rather than the intrinsic performance of the species itself. The model presented here allows formalizing a macroscopic perspective whereby a community harboring organisms at varying abundances becomes equivalent to a single organism expressing genes at different levels. While most natural communities do not satisfy the strict criteria of multicellularity developed by multi-level selection theory, the effective cohesion described here is a generic consequence of resource partitioning, requires no cooperative interactions, and can be expected to be widespread in microbial ecosystems.
Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications, Harvard University, Cambridge, United States.|Harvard John A Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, United States.|Kavli Institute for Bionano Science and Technology, Harvard University, Cambridge, United States.
Mikhail
0000-0002-9558-1121
M
Tikhonov
D017753:Ecosystem; D008954:Models, Biological
computational biology; consortia; cooperation; ecology; microbial ecology; niche construction; none; resource competition; systems biology