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Open AccessCooperative growth in microbial communities is a driver of multistability
Microbial communities often exhibit more than one possible stable composition for the same set of external conditions. In the human microbiome, these persistent changes in species composition and abundance are...
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Open AccessStrong ethanol- and frequency-dependent ecological interactions in a community of wine-fermenting yeasts
Natural wine fermentation depends on a complex consortium of native microorganisms rather than inoculation of industrial yeast strains. While this diversity of yeasts can result in an increased repertoire of w...
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Article
Open AccessCaenorhabditis elegans foraging patterns follow a simple rule of thumb
Rules of thumb are behavioral algorithms that approximate optimal behavior while lowering cognitive and sensory costs. One way to reduce these costs is by simplifying the representation of the environment: Whi...
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Author Correction: Resource–diversity relationships in bacterial communities reflect the network structure of microbial metabolism
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Resource–diversity relationships in bacterial communities reflect the network structure of microbial metabolism
The relationship between the number of available nutrients and community diversity is a central question in ecological research that remains unanswered. Here we studied the assembly of hundreds of soil-derived...
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Higher temperatures generically favour slower-growing bacterial species in multispecies communities
Temperature is one of the fundamental environmental variables that determine the composition and function of microbial communities. However, a predictive understanding of how microbial communities respond to c...
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Strength of species interactions determines biodiversity and stability in microbial communities
Organisms—especially microbes—tend to live together in ecosystems. While some of these ecosystems are very biodiverse, others are not, and while some are very stable over time, others undergo strong temporal f...
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Open AccessMortality causes universal changes in microbial community composition
All organisms are sensitive to the abiotic environment, and a deteriorating environment can cause extinction. However, survival in a multispecies community depends upon interactions, and some species may even ...
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Open AccessPublisher Correction: Migration alters oscillatory dynamics and promotes survival in connected bacterial populations
In the original version of this Article, an additional double-headed arrow was inadvertently included within Fig. 3e. This error has been corrected in both the PDF and HTML versions of the Article.
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Open AccessMigration alters oscillatory dynamics and promotes survival in connected bacterial populations
Migration influences population dynamics on networks, thereby playing a vital role in scenarios ranging from species extinction to epidemic propagation. While low migration rates prevent local populations from...
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Open AccessAsymmetric migration decreases stability but increases resilience in a heterogeneous metapopulation
Many natural populations are spatially distributed, forming a network of subpopulations linked by migration. Migration patterns are often asymmetric and heterogeneous, with important consequences on the ecolog...
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Ecological suicide in microbes
The growth and survival of organisms often depend on interactions between them. In many cases, these interactions are positive and caused by a cooperative modification of the environment. Examples are the coop...
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Open AccessRandom sequences rapidly evolve into de novo promoters
How new functions arise de novo is a fundamental question in evolution. We studied de novo evolution of promoters in Escherichia coli by replacing the lac promoter with various random sequences of the same size (...
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Direct observation of increasing recovery length before collapse of a marine benthic ecosystem
Ecosystems can experience catastrophic transitions to alternative states, yet recent results have suggested that slowing down in rates of recovery after a perturbation may provide advance warning that a critic...
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Community structure follows simple assembly rules in microbial microcosms
Microorganisms typically form diverse communities of interacting species, whose activities have tremendous impact on the plants, animals and humans they associate with. The ability to predict the structure of ...
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Life in a jam
Jammed states in growing yeast populations share intriguing similarities with amorphous solids, despite being generated through self-replication. The impact this behaviour has on cell division highlights one w...
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Open AccessMicrobial interactions lead to rapid micro-scale successions on model marine particles
In the ocean, organic particles harbour diverse bacterial communities, which collectively digest and recycle essential nutrients. Traits like motility and exo-enzyme production allow individual taxa to coloniz...
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Self-organized patchiness facilitates survival in a cooperatively growing Bacillus subtilis population
Ecosystems are highly structured. Organisms are not randomly distributed but can be found in spatial aggregates at many scales, leading to spatial heterogeneity or even regular patterns1. The widespread occurrenc...
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Clustering in community structure across replicate ecosystems following a long-term bacterial evolution experiment
Experiments to date probing adaptive evolution have predominantly focused on studying a single species or a pair of species in isolation. In nature, on the other hand, species evolve within complex communities...
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Dynamics of a producer-freeloader ecosystem on the brink of collapse
Ecosystems can undergo sudden shifts to undesirable states, but recent studies with simple single-species ecosystems have demonstrated that advance warning can be provided by the slowing down of population dyn...
