DIEP seminar by Jacopo Grilli
Competition without contingency and functional convergence
Microbial communities are taxonomically diverse and variable: species presence and their abudances widely fluctuate over time and space, and even across biological replicates in experimental controlled conditions. On the other hand, environmental conditions exert a strong selection on the traits of community members and the function they perform, and similar environmental conditions are expected to correspond to functionally similar communities. The consequence of this environmental selection, together with taxonomic variability, lead to the influental concept of functional redundancy: the same function is performed by many species, so that one may assemble communities with different species but the same functional profile.
The centrality of the concept of functional redundancy in microbial ecology does not parallel with a theoretical understanding of its origin. In this talk I will describe the eco-evolutionary dynamics of communities interacting through competition and cross-feeding. I will show that the eco-evolutionary trajectories rapidly converge to a "functional attractor'', characterized by a functional composition uniquely determined by environmental conditions. The taxonomic composition instead follows non-reproducible dynamics, constrained by the conservation of the functional composition. This framework provides a deep theoretical foundation to the concepts of functional robustness and redundancy.
If you wish to attend this seminar online, please send an email to w.merbis@uva.nl to receive the zoom-link.