Deconstructing taxa x taxa x environment interactions in the mi-crobiota: A theoretical examination

摘要

2021 MAY 03 (NewsRx) - By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Disease Prevention Daily - According to news reporting based on a preprint abstract, our journalists obtained the following quote sourced from biorxiv.org: "A major objective of microbial ecology is to identify how the composition of gut microbial taxa shapes host phenotypes. "However, most studies focus solely on community level patterns and pairwise interactions and ignore the potentially significant effects of higher order interactions involving three or more component taxa. Studies on higher order interactions among microbial taxa are scarce for many reasons, including experimental intractability, daunting diversity and complexity of many microbial systems, and the potential confounding role of the environment. Moreover, we still lack the empirical and statistical tools to isolate and understand the role of higher order interactions on the host. Here, we apply a mathematical approach to quantifying the effects of higher order interactions among taxa on host infection risk.