Steering ecological-evolutionary dynamics to improve artificial selection of microbial communities

This is a video walkthrough of our recent theoretical work on how to improve the efficiency of artificial community selection.

Published in Ecology & Evolution

Like

Share this post

Choose a social network to share with, or copy the URL to share elsewhere

This is a representation of how your post may appear on social media. The actual post will vary between social networks
Microbial communities often perform important functions that depend on inter-species interactions. To improve community function via artificial selection, one can repeatedly grow many communities to allow mutations to arise, and “reproduce” the highest-functioning communities by partitioning each into multiple offspring communities for the next cycle. Since improvement is often unimpressive in experiments, we study how to design effective selection strategies in silico. In this video, we try to walk readers through our recent theoretical/simulation paper on how to improve the efficiency of artificial community selection. We will discussed how intracommunity ecological and evolutionary processes affect the heritability of community function, which in turn determines the dynamics and outcome of community selection.  We then devise experimentally-implementable manipulations to enhance community function heritability, which speeds up community function improvement under various scenarios.

Please sign in or register for FREE

If you are a registered user on Research Communities by Springer Nature, please sign in

Follow the Topic

Ecology
Life Sciences > Biological Sciences > Ecology

Related Collections

With Collections, you can get published faster and increase your visibility.

Women's Health

A selection of recent articles that highlight issues relevant to the treatment of neurological and psychiatric disorders in women.

Publishing Model: Hybrid

Deadline: Ongoing

Advances in neurodegenerative diseases

This Collection aims to bring together research from various domains related to neurodegenerative conditions, encompassing novel insights into disease pathophysiology, diagnostics, therapeutic developments, and care strategies. We welcome the submission of all papers relevant to advances in neurodegenerative disease.

Publishing Model: Hybrid

Deadline: Dec 24, 2025