Microbial Ecology
Understanding How Microbial Communities WorkWhat makes a microbial system stable or unstable with respect to function and community structure? For a long time, researchers hypothesized that stability is related to diversity with low and high diversity systems being less stable and medium diversity systems being more stable. As part of my post-doctoral work at MSU and Stanford, I studied the functional networks and community structures of dozens of anaerobic bioreactors as model systems under normal and perturbed conditions and proved that it is the flexibility of functional networks (i.e., the ability to process substrate in parallel) that makes a system more stable (Hashsham, et al., Fernandez et al., 2000). I demonstrated that, in this respect, complex biological systems are no different than transportation grids or computational networks. They all are more efficient and more stable when performing their corresponding "function" in parallel. My approach to compute the functional stability of microbial communities has been referenced numerous times and incorporated in reviews that discuss the impact of such studies in very broad terms. For example, Free and Barton refer to the above publications in the context of what makes the biosphere stable and self-regulatory (Do evolution and ecology need the Gaia hypothesis? Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 22(11): 2007). [The Gaia hypothesis treats the Earth as a single organism consisting of coupled biosphere and their physical components. This interest in quantitative microbial ecology has continued since then (Callister et al., 2009) and has received a renewed interest due to the relevance of ecological principles to the gut microbiome and other environmental systems (Johnson et al., 2016). |
Selected Publicatons
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