How is gut species diversity affected when vital nutrients are only seasonally available? (IMAGE)

Princeton University

How is gut species diversity affected when vital nutrients are only seasonally available?

Caption

In their paper appearing September 11, 2020 in the journal eLife, Princeton researchers Amir Erez, Jaime Lopez, Ned Wingreen and colleagues use mathematical modeling to explore how species diversity in a bacterial community is affected when the nutrients the microbes depend upon are only seasonally available. Here, different colors represent the relative abundance of different species when nutrients are only seasonally available. Community diversity is high when the bolus of nutrients supplies either very low (top graph) or very high (bottom graph) amounts of nutrients, but one species dominates at the expense of others (dark blue line, middle graph) at intermediate levels of nutrient supply.

Credit

Amir Erez, Jaime G. Lopez, Benjamin Weiner, Yigal Meir, and Ned S. Wingreen

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