Inferring resource competition in microbial communities from time series

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Chen, Xiaowen, Crocker, Kyle, Kuehn, Seppe, Walczak, Aleksandra M., Mora, Thierry
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Chen, Xiaowen
Crocker, Kyle
Kuehn, Seppe
Walczak, Aleksandra M.
Mora, Thierry
author_facet Chen, Xiaowen
Crocker, Kyle
Kuehn, Seppe
Walczak, Aleksandra M.
Mora, Thierry
contents The competition for resources is a defining feature of microbial communities. In many contexts, from soils to host-associated communities, highly diverse microbes are organized into metabolic groups or guilds with similar resource preferences. The resource preferences of individual taxa that give rise to these guilds are critical for understanding fluxes of resources through the community and the structure of diversity in the system. However, inferring the metabolic capabilities of individual taxa, and their competition with other taxa, within a community is challenging and unresolved. Here we address this gap in knowledge by leveraging dynamic measurements of abundances in communities. We show that simple correlations are often misleading in predicting resource competition. We show that spectral methods such as the cross-power spectral density (CPSD) and coherence that account for time-delayed effects are superior metrics for inferring the structure of resource competition in communities. We first demonstrate this fact on synthetic data generated from consumer-resource models with time-dependent resource availability, where taxa are organized into groups or guilds with similar resource preferences. By applying spectral methods to oceanic plankton time-series data, we demonstrate that these methods detect interaction structures among species with similar genomic sequences. Our results indicate that analyzing temporal data across multiple timescales can reveal the underlying structure of resource competition within communities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_04520
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Inferring resource competition in microbial communities from time series
Chen, Xiaowen
Crocker, Kyle
Kuehn, Seppe
Walczak, Aleksandra M.
Mora, Thierry
Physics and Society
Populations and Evolution
The competition for resources is a defining feature of microbial communities. In many contexts, from soils to host-associated communities, highly diverse microbes are organized into metabolic groups or guilds with similar resource preferences. The resource preferences of individual taxa that give rise to these guilds are critical for understanding fluxes of resources through the community and the structure of diversity in the system. However, inferring the metabolic capabilities of individual taxa, and their competition with other taxa, within a community is challenging and unresolved. Here we address this gap in knowledge by leveraging dynamic measurements of abundances in communities. We show that simple correlations are often misleading in predicting resource competition. We show that spectral methods such as the cross-power spectral density (CPSD) and coherence that account for time-delayed effects are superior metrics for inferring the structure of resource competition in communities. We first demonstrate this fact on synthetic data generated from consumer-resource models with time-dependent resource availability, where taxa are organized into groups or guilds with similar resource preferences. By applying spectral methods to oceanic plankton time-series data, we demonstrate that these methods detect interaction structures among species with similar genomic sequences. Our results indicate that analyzing temporal data across multiple timescales can reveal the underlying structure of resource competition within communities.
title Inferring resource competition in microbial communities from time series
topic Physics and Society
Populations and Evolution
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.04520