New insights into the dynamics of microbial communities

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New insights into the dynamics of microbial communities

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, within the Department of Theoretical Biology, characterized a recently discovered dynamical regime of microbial communities and used it to explain empirical patterns of marine plankton. There, strong and diverse interactions, combined with weak dispersal, fuel a continuous turnover of the small set of very abundant species, such that success is ephemeral and every species …