Detecting (the Absence of) Species Interactions in Microbial Ecological Systems

Microbial communities are complex ecological systems of organisms that evolve in time, with new variants created, while others disappear. Understanding how species interact within communities can help us shed light into the mechanisms that drive ecosystem processes. We studied systems with serial propagation, where the community is kept alive by taking a subsample at regular intervals and replating it in fresh medium. The data that are usually collected consist of the % of the population for each of the species, at several time points. In order to utilize this type of data, we formulated a system of equations (based on the generalized Lotka-Volterra model) and derived conditions of species noninteraction. This was possible to achieve by reformulating the problem as a problem of finding feasibility domains, which can be solved by a number of efficient algorithms. This methodology provides a cost-effective way to investigate interactions in microbial communities.