Imperial College London
Alternate

ProfessorThomasBell

Faculty of Natural Sciences, Department of Life Sciences (Silwood Park)

Professor of Microbial Ecology
 
 
 
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Contact

 

+44 (0)20 7594 2268thomas.bell

 
 
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Location

 

MunroSilwood Park

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Bell:2020:10.1098/rstb.2019.0245,
author = {Bell, T and Pascual, Garcia A and Bonhoeffer, S},
doi = {10.1098/rstb.2019.0245},
journal = {Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences},
title = {Metabolically cohesive microbial consortia and ecosystem functioning},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0245},
volume = {374},
year = {2020}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - Recent theory and experiments have reported a reproducible tendency for the coexistence of microbial species under controlled environmental conditions. This observation has been explained in6the context of competition for resources and metabolic complementarity given that, in microbial communities, many excreted by-products of metabolism may also be resources. Microbial communities therefore play a key role in promoting their own stability and in shaping the niches of the constituent taxa. We suggest that an intermediate level of organisation between the species and the community level may be pervasive, where tightly-knit metabolic interactions create discrete consortia that are stably maintained. We call these units Metabolically Cohesive Consortia (MeCoCos) and we discuss the environmental context in which we expect their formation, and the ecological and evolutionary consequences of their existence. We argue that the ability to identify MeCoCos would open new avenues to link the species-, community-, and ecosystem-level properties, with consequences for our understanding of microbial ecology and evolution, and an improved ability to predict ecosystem functioning in the wild.
AU  - Bell,T
AU  - Pascual,Garcia A
AU  - Bonhoeffer,S
DO  - 10.1098/rstb.2019.0245
PY  - 2020///
SN  - 0962-8436
TI  - Metabolically cohesive microbial consortia and ecosystem functioning
T2  - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0245
UR  - https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2019.0245
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/77414
VL  - 374
ER  -
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