在不同的微生物中,物种丰度随时间而变化,具有独特的统计行为,这些行为似乎在宿主之间泛化,但是这些模式的起源和含义尚不清楚。这里,我们表明,许多这些宏观生态模式可以通过一类简单的消费者-资源模型定量概括,其中不同物种的代谢能力是从一个共同的统计分布中随机得出的。我们的模型仅使用少量全局参数对社区的消费者资源属性进行参数化,包括资源总数,随着时间的推移,典型的资源波动,以及物种间资源消耗分布的平均重叠。我们表明,这些宏观参数的变化强烈影响模型生成的时间序列统计,我们确定了特定的全球参数集,这些参数可以概括广泛的微生物的宏观生态模式,包括人类的肠道,唾液,还有阴道,以及老鼠的肠子和大米,无需指定资源消耗的微观细节。这些发现表明,资源竞争可能是社区动态的主要驱动力。我们的工作在一个简单的模型下统一了许多时间序列模式,并提供了一个可访问的框架,从微生物群落的纵向研究中推断有效资源竞争的宏观参数。
Across diverse microbiotas, species abundances vary in time with distinctive statistical behaviors that appear to generalize across hosts, but the origins and implications of these patterns remain unclear. Here, we show that many of these macroecological patterns can be quantitatively recapitulated by a simple class of consumer-resource models, in which the metabolic capabilities of different species are randomly drawn from a common statistical distribution. Our model parametrizes the consumer-resource properties of a community using only a small number of global parameters, including the total number of resources, typical resource fluctuations over time, and the average overlap in resource-consumption profiles across species. We show that variation in these macroscopic parameters strongly affects the time series statistics generated by the model, and we identify specific sets of global parameters that can recapitulate macroecological patterns across wide-ranging microbiotas, including the human gut, saliva, and vagina, as well as mouse gut and rice, without needing to specify microscopic details of resource consumption. These findings suggest that resource competition may be a dominant driver of community dynamics. Our work unifies numerous time series patterns under a simple model, and provides an accessible framework to infer macroscopic parameters of effective resource competition from longitudinal studies of microbial communities.