Abstract
Microbial communities routinely have several possible species compositions or community states observed for the same environmental parameters. Changes in these parameters can trigger abrupt and persistent transitions (regime shifts) between such community states. Yet little is known about the main determinants and mechanisms of multistability in microbial communities. Here, we introduce and study a consumer-resource model in which microbes compete for two types of essential nutrients each represented by multiple different metabolites. We adapt game-theoretical methods of the stable matching problem to identify all possible species compositions of such microbial communities. We then classify them by their resilience against three types of perturbations: fluctuations in nutrient supply, invasions by new species, and small changes of abundances of existing ones. We observe multistability and explore an intricate network of regime shifts between stable states in our model. Our results suggest that multistability requires microbial species to have different stoichiometries of essential nutrients. We also find that a balanced nutrient supply promotes multistability and species diversity, yet make individual community states less stable.
Highlights
Recent metagenomics studies revealed that microbial communities collected in similar environments are often composed of rather different sets of species[1,2,3,4,5,6]
The principal component analysis of predicted microbial abundances in our model shows a separation between the alternative stable states reminiscent of reallife microbial ecosystems
We further explore an intricate network of regime shifts between the alternative stable states in our model triggered by changes in nutrient supply
Summary
Recent metagenomics studies revealed that microbial communities collected in similar environments are often composed of rather different sets of species[1,2,3,4,5,6]. Changes in environmental parameters may trigger abrupt and persistent transitions between these alternative species compositions[7,8,9]. Such transitions, known as ecosystem regime shifts, significantly alter the function of a microbial community and are difficult to reverse. Understanding mechanisms and principal determinants of alternative species compositions and shifts between them is practically important. They have been extensively studied over the past several decades[10,11,12,13,14,15,16]
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