Integrating ecological and engineering concepts of resilience in microbial communities
Open accessAbstract
Many definitions of resilience have been proffered for natural and engineered ecosystems, but a conceptual consensus on resilience in microbial communities is still lacking. We argue that the disconnect largely results from the wide variance in microbial community complexity, which range from compositionally simple synthetic consortia to complex natural communities, and divergence between the typical practical outcomes emphasized by ecologists and engineers. Viewing microbial communities as elasto-plastic systems that undergo both recoverable and unrecoverable transitions, we argue that this gap between the engineering and ecological definitions of resilience stems from their respective emphases on elastic and plastic deformation, respectively. We propose that the two concepts may be fundamentally united around the resilience of function rather than state in microbial communities and the regularity in the relationship between environmental variation and a community's functional response. Furthermore, we posit that functional resilience is an intrinsic property of microbial communities and suggest that state changes in response to environmental variation may be a key mechanism driving functional resilience in microbial communities.
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Activity of the gut microbiota may exhibit resilience despite fluctuating community membership and structure.
“the activity of the gut microbiota may exhibit resilience despite fluctuating community membership and structure (Song et al., 2015)”
From Gut reactions: Breaking down xenobiotic–microbiome interactions (2019) · cites this paper as Song et al., 2015
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Gut reactions: Breaking down xenobiotic–microbiome interactions
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- Authors
- Song, H.-S., Renslow, R. S., Fredrickson, J. K., & Lindemann, S. R.
- Affiliations
- Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (US)
- Corresponding author
- Lindemann, Stephen R.
- Venue
- Frontiers in Microbiology
- Publisher
- Frontiers Media SA
- Published
- 2015-12-01
- Volume
- 6
- Pages
- 1298-1298
- ISSN
- 1664-302X (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC4664643
- OpenAlex
- W2178426985
- Cited by
- 76
- References
- 53
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 7 · 2023: 6 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 7 · 2020: 7 · 2019: 6 · 2018: 21 · 2017: 6 · 2016: 3
- FWCI
- 8.20
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- Frontiers in Microbiology (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) (submittedVersion)
- Lincoln (University of Nebraska) (submittedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- U.S. Department of Energy (KP1601010, KP1702030)
- Biological and Environmental Research
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Ecosystem dynamics and resilience
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Ecology › Microbial Community Ecology and Physiology
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Gut microbiota and health
- Keywords
- microbial community resilience, functional resilience, synthetic microbial consortia, environmental variability, functional response, ecological engineering, resilience definitions
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