Microbes exist in complex, multi-species communities with diverse interactions that play an essential role in both human health as well as the health of the planet. Over the last decade tremendous progress has been made in characterizing these communities, but the lack of experimentally tractable model systems has made it difficult to discern the rules governing microbial community
Results/Conclusions
In this talk I will describe our recent experimental efforts to develop a bottom Abstractup approach to understanding the dynamics of these communities. We find that microbial communities often respond in surprisingly simple ways to changes in resource availability, providing insight into community diversity, stability, and transitions between alternative stable states. In particular, we find that microbial communities often lose both stability and diversity in nutrient rich environments in which there is extensive population growth and strong interactions mediated by changes to the environment. In these conditions we often observe alternative stable states of the community, and we demonstrate that transient invasions by another species can induce transitions between the states.