Speaker
Description
A major aspiration is to understand the forces that drive composition and functionality of bacterial communities. The abiotic and biotic environment, historical contingency, chance and evolutionary process are all discussed as important factors. In communities, biotic interactions may affect not only composition and functionality but also how species evolve. In the first part I will show that community context can dramatically alter evolutionary dynamics using a novel approach that "cages" individual focal strains within complex communities. We find that evolution of focal bacterial strains depends on properties both of the focal strain and of the surrounding community. In the second part of the talk, I will present latest, yet unpublished insight, that high parallelism in the assembly process is determined by the abiotic environment, but also that individual species have the power to amend composition. However, functionality of the communities depends on historical contingency and evolutionary processes. Finally, I find that, over evolutionary time-scales, interspecific interactions are mainly competitive or neutral in complex communities. The findings demonstrate that adaptation, biotic interactions and historical contingency act in concert to determine community fate.
