Multi-Replicated Enrichment Communities As a Model System in Microbial Ecology

Overview

Journal Front Microbiol

Specialty Microbiology

Date 2021 Apr 26

PMID 33897672

Citations 13

Authors

Sylvie Estrela

Alvaro Sanchez

Maria Rebolleda-Gomez

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Recent advances in robotics and affordable genomic sequencing technologies have made it possible to establish and quantitatively track the assembly of enrichment communities in high-throughput. By conducting community assembly experiments in up to thousands of synthetic habitats, where the extrinsic sources of variation among replicates can be controlled, we can now study the reproducibility and predictability of microbial community assembly at different levels of organization, and its relationship with nutrient composition and other ecological drivers. Through a dialog with mathematical models, high-throughput enrichment communities are bringing us closer to the goal of developing a quantitative predictive theory of microbial community assembly. In this short review, we present an overview of recent research on this growing field, highlighting the connection between theory and experiments and suggesting directions for future work.

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