English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Non-equilibrium thermodynamics has long been an area of substantial interestto ecologists because most fundamental biological processes, such as proteinsynthesis and respiration, are inherently energy-consuming. Microbialcommunities are a natural system to decipher this mechanistic basis becausetheir interactions in the form of substrate consumption, metabolite production,and cross-feeding can be described explicitly in thermodynamic terms. Previouswork has considered how thermodynamic constraints impact competition betweenpairs of species, but restrained from analysing how this manifests in complexdynamical systems. To address this gap, we develop a thermodynamic microbialcommunity model with fully reversible reaction kinetics, which allows directconsideration of free-energy dissipation. This also allows species to interactvia products rather than just substrates, increasing the dynamical complexity,and allowing a more nuanced classification of interaction types to emerge.Using this model, we find that community diversity increases with substratelability, because greater free-energy availability allows for faster generationof niches. Thus, more niches are generated in the time frame of communityestablishment, leading to higher final species diversity. We also find thatallowing species to make use of near-to-equilibrium reactions increasesdiversity in a low free-energy regime. In such a regime, two new thermodynamicinteraction types that we identify here reach comparable strengths to theconventional (competition and facilitation) types, emphasising the key rolethat thermodynamics plays in community dynamics. Our results suggest thataccounting for realistic thermodynamic constraints is vital for understandingthe dynamics of real-world microbial communities.

Thermodynamic constraints on the assembly and diversity of microbial ecosystems are different near to and far from equilibrium