High-order interactions distort the functional landscape of microbial consortia

• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3000550
• Publication Date: 2019-12-12T18:46:33Z
• Authors: Alicia Sanchez-Go...; Djordje Bajić; Melisa L. Osborne; Juan F. Poyatos; Alvaro Sanchez
• Keywords: Robustness

Understanding the link between community composition and function is a major challenge in microbial population biology, with implications for management of natural microbiomes design synthetic consortia. Specifically, it poorly understood whether functions can be quantitatively predicted from traits species monoculture. Inspired by study complex genetic interactions, we have examined how amylolytic rate combinatorial assemblages six starch-degrading soil bacteria depend on separate functional contributions each their interactions. Filtering our results through theory biochemical kinetics, show that this simple additive absence interactions among members. For about half combinatorially assembled consortia, dominated pairwise higher-order other half, despite presence strong competitive We explain mechanistic basis these findings propose quantitative framework allows us to effect behavioral dynamics Our suggest robustness consortium critically affects ability predict bottom-up engineer ecosystem communities.