Abstract
Competition can lead to the exclusion of bacterial taxa when there is a transitive relationship among competitors with a hierarchy of competitive success. However, competition may not prevent bacterial coexistence if competitors form intransitive loops, in which none is able to outcompete all the rest. Both transitive and intransitive competition have been demonstrated in bacterial model systems. However, in natural soil microbial assemblages competition is typically understood as a dominance relationship leading to the exclusion of weak competitors. Here, we argue that transitive and intransitive interactions concurrently determine the structure of soil microbial communities. We explain why pairwise interactions cannot depict competition correctly in complex communities, and propose an alternative through the detection of strongly connected components (SCCs) in microbial networks. We finally analyse the existence of SCCs in soil bacterial communities in two Mediterranean ecosystems, for illustrative purposes only (rather than with the aim of providing a methodological tool) due to current limitations, and discuss future avenues to experimentally test the existence of SCCs in nature.
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Acknowledgements
We received grants PID2020-119634GB-I00, PID2020-113157GB-I00 and EUR2021-121995 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and CIPROM/2021/63 from Generalitat Valenciana. JANC received grant RYC2019-026848-I also funded by MCIN/AEI and by “ESF Investing in your future”.
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MV, JMA and MG conceived the idea of the manuscript. JNC collected the data, and all authors contributed to data analyses. MV, JMA and MG wrote the first draft of the manuscript, which all authors reviewed.
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Verdú, M., Alcántara, J.M., Navarro-Cano, J.A. et al. Transitivity and intransitivity in soil bacterial networks. ISME J 17, 2135–2139 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41396-023-01540-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41396-023-01540-8