Deconstructing taxa x taxa xenvironment interactions in the microbiota: A theoretical examination

Senay Yitbarek; John Guittar; Sarah A Knutie; C Brandon Ogbunugafor

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2023.107875

Deconstructing taxa x taxa xenvironment interactions in the microbiota: A theoretical examination

iScience. 2023 Sep 9;26(10):107875. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2023.107875. eCollection 2023 Oct 20.

Authors

Senay Yitbarek¹, John Guittar^{2

3}, Sarah A Knutie^{4

5}, C Brandon Ogbunugafor^{6

7

8

9}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Biology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA.
² Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA.
³ Kellogg Biological Station, Michigan State University, Hickory Corners, MI 49060, USA.
⁴ Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269, USA.
⁵ Institute for Systems Genomics, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269, USA.
⁶ Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA.
⁷ Department of Chemistry, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
⁸ Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA.
⁹ Vermont Complex Systems Center, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT 05405, USA.

Abstract

A major objective of microbial ecology is to identify how the composition of microbial taxa shapes host phenotypes. However, most studies focus on pairwise interactions and ignore the potentially significant effects of higher-order microbial interactions.Here, we quantify the effects of higher-order interactions among taxa on host infection risk. We apply our approach to an in silico dataset that is built to resemble a population of insect hosts with gut-associated microbial communities at risk of infection from an intestinal parasite across a breadth of nutrient environmental contexts.We find that the effect of higher-order interactions is considerable and can change appreciably across environmental contexts. Furthermore, we show that higher-order interactions can stabilize community structure thereby reducing host susceptibility to parasite invasion.Our approach illustrates how incorporating the effects of higher-order interactions among gut microbiota across environments can be essential for understanding their effects on host phenotypes.

Keywords: Ecology; Evolutionary ecology; Microbiology.