Associate professor @MIT_CEE. Into eco-evolutionary dynamics & #microbes. 
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Descending to the twitter underworld once more to announce that our latest paper is finally online: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)30345-8 … – check it out
The degradation of polysaccharides is a fascinating process. It affects the global carbon cycle (as well as your digestion) ... What's amazing to me is that it involves the physical assembly of hundreds of species, with many more interactions ...
Here is a picture bacteria colonizing a chitin particle ... (credit to Julia Schwartzman, a brilliant postdoc in my lab)pic.twitter.com/t7jptnO9Vn
What we learned through this work is that, despite the very large number of potential interactions (N^2), microbial communities can have a simple trophic structure that makes their dynamics easily predictable and their assembly modular.
... in the first trophic level, groups of specialists (black and blue), which excel at degrading only one type of polysaccharide, interact with the resource. One level below, a polysaccharide independent group consumes metabolic byproducts from specialists (pink).pic.twitter.com/NfNTXCRkFV
So, maybe microbial communities are not as complex as some people may think (too many species and many more interactions). If we can learn how to identify functional groups perhaps a simpler picture would emerge, making it easier to predict their dynamics. We'll see. Stay tuned.
Nice work! Curious whether the secondary degarders reduce the primary's yield in coculture? Also, isn't it surprising that the same coefficients worked for the primary and secondary degrders in the linear model?
Cool work! The trophic structure finding is quite interesting, and I believe it's quite generic in microbial populations. We recently found four trophic levels (as opposed to the two you find here) in the human gut microbiome:https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/603365v1 …
Striking that this picture of cross-feeding interactions with hundreds of species in the microbiome --- it's not a total mess, but instead simple, stepwise and hierarchical.pic.twitter.com/BWv0MoUibL
Amazing and interesting work @oxcordero !
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