We just posted a new preprint to bioRxiv on "Imbalance in gut microbial interactions as a marker of health and disease." A major goal of gut microbiome research is to identify properties of these communities that decisively correspond to the health of the host. Many researchers consider taxonomic diversity in this vein, but the correspondence of diversity with health is weak across diseases, with diversity decreasing for some diseases and increasing for others. In this work, we use a consumer-resource model with metabolic constraints to show that the balance of competitive and cross-feeding interactions corresponds with the overall ecological dynamics of the community. By inferring this balance of interactions in gut microbiome data, we show that it matches with disease state better than does diversity.
This has been a collaboration led primarily by Juan Bonachela, from the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources at Rutgers, and Roberto Corral López and Miguel Angel Muñoz at the University of Granada, Spain, with additional contributions from the microbiome labs of Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello and Martin Blaser at Rutgers and Simon Levin at Princeton University.
