Pairing off: a bottom-up approach to the human gut microbiome

Abstract

The human gut microbiome has been implicated in a variety of health outcomes, and extensive research has aimed to understand its composition and function, primarily via metagenomic analyses. An examination of how the microbiome develops and interacts through interspecies competition and cooperation has been lacking so far. In their recent work, Venturelli et al (2018) build a synthetic gut community and accurately predict its dynamics with a simple network of pairwise interactions.

Figure 1. Interaction network of microbiome constructed from pairwise dynamics

The temporal dynamics of two‐species bacterial communities were used by Venturelli et al (2018) to estimate the parameters of a Lotka–Volterra model. The parameters of this model represent growth rates, intra‐ and interspecies interactions, and the interspecies interaction coefficients can be used to visualize the microbial ecological network.