Alvaro Sanchez

New preprint from the lab: The Latent Simplicity of Microbial Ecological Interactions www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We're excited about this one. We find that high-order microbial interactions often obey simple linear laws making microbial communities far more predictable than one might expect

We thus find that community function is predictable not because interactions are absent or weak, but because interactions at different orders are not independent, they're linked by simple linear relationships. What looks like significant intxn complexity can hide a strikingly simple organization.

New preprint from the lab: The Latent Simplicity of Microbial Ecological Interactions www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We're excited about this one. We find that high-order microbial interactions often obey simple linear laws making microbial communities far more predictable than one might expect

This leads to a final hypothesis: if the dominant biomass mode is set by species yield, it should remain stable as species abundances change. We tested this over 10 days of serial passaging. Despite large shifts in abundance, the dominant mode barely moved and stayed aligned with yield.

New preprint from the lab: The Latent Simplicity of Microbial Ecological Interactions www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We're excited about this one. We find that high-order microbial interactions often obey simple linear laws making microbial communities far more predictable than one might expect

Importantly, this collapse is not just descriptive. Once the leading mode (u_1) is known, together with its eigenvalue and the additive effects, we can actually calculate the one-dimensional curve that organizes the landscape. With two modes, the same idea gives the full two-dimensional surface.

New preprint from the lab: The Latent Simplicity of Microbial Ecological Interactions www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We're excited about this one. We find that high-order microbial interactions often obey simple linear laws making microbial communities far more predictable than one might expect

Consumer-Resource models gave us a clear prediction: the dominant collective mode that makes community-function landscapes approximately 1-dimensional should be approx. the same as a vector of species traits, formed by the metabolic efficiencies, or yields, of each species.

New preprint from the lab: The Latent Simplicity of Microbial Ecological Interactions www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We're excited about this one. We find that high-order microbial interactions often obey simple linear laws making microbial communities far more predictable than one might expect

This simple organization has a major consequence: species’ effects on community function do not vary independently across backgrounds. Instead, they rise and fall together. As a result, the full community-function landscape becomes a function of just one or two ecological collective modes.

New preprint from the lab: The Latent Simplicity of Microbial Ecological Interactions www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We're excited about this one. We find that high-order microbial interactions often obey simple linear laws making microbial communities far more predictable than one might expect

To test this prediction, we built complete community-function landscapes containing every combination of five bacterial species, measuring both biomass and pyoverdine production. We then repeated the entire experiment across 31 different resource environments.

New preprint from the lab: The Latent Simplicity of Microbial Ecological Interactions www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We're excited about this one. We find that high-order microbial interactions often obey simple linear laws making microbial communities far more predictable than one might expect

A clue comes from the previous observation of Functional Effect Equations (FEEs): the effect of adding a species often depends linearly on the function of the community it joins. But that effect itself emerges from interactions at all orders. What does a strong FEE tell us about those interactions?

New preprint from the lab: The Latent Simplicity of Microbial Ecological Interactions www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We're excited about this one. We find that high-order microbial interactions often obey simple linear laws making microbial communities far more predictable than one might expect