Higher-order ecological interactions within pathogenic communities

Description

Microbes interact with each other in various ways within an ecosystem. When investigating interactions with more than two interacting members, complexity is added to a system in the form of higher-order interactions. Higher-order interactions can potentially alter the response to a biotic or abiotic environment encountered by an organism. Even though higher-order interactions play an important role in microbial ecology and evolution, they are still poorly understood and are mostly investigated theoretically. We showed the presence of higher-order interactions by measuring interactions between uropathogenic bacteria in environments with increasing levels of complexity,starting from pairwise interactions. We found that pairwise bacterial interactions could often not predict the higher-order interactions with respect to population size and growth rate. Our findings show the importance of higher-order interactions in small pathogenic communities, and the need fora better consensus on the quantification of higher-order ecological interactions.

Periode	28-jun.-2022
Evenementstitel	Netherlands Society for Evolutionary Biology Meeting 2022
Evenementstype	Conference
Conferentienummer	5
Locatie	Ede, NetherlandsToon op kaart
Mate van erkenning	National