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. 2025 Jan 8:15:1497083.
doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2024.1497083. eCollection 2024.

Healthy gut microbiomes are host-controllable microbiomes

Théodore Bouchez  1 , Bin Liu  2 , Daniel Rios Garza  1
Affiliations

Healthy gut microbiomes are host-controllable microbiomes

Théodore Bouchez et al. Front Microbiol. .
No abstract available

Keywords: control theory; dysbiosis; gut microbiome; microbiome; microbiome ecology and evolution.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Fraction of stable microbiomes with and without a controller in 10,000 GLV simulations. Random microbiomes were simulated with increasing interaction strengths and numbers of species. Each dot represents 100 simulations and is colored according to the fraction that resulted in a stable microbiome. Dark blue dots indicate cases where all 100 simulations were unstable, while dark red dots indicate cases where all were stable. The white transition zone represents intermediate stability. The results show that adding a controller—here idealized as a device that senses the microbiome's current composition and adjusts species growth rates to guide the system toward a desired composition—significantly increases the range of stable microbiomes. Stability, as defined here following May's original model, refers to whether the system returns to equilibrium after a small perturbation based on the signs of the eigenvalues of the Jacobian matrix at the equilibrium point.
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