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Transitivity and intransitivity in soil bacterial networks

The ISME Journal volume 17, pages 2135–2139 (2023)Cite this article

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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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Fig. 1: Transitive and intransitive competition.
Fig. 2: Strongly connected components in a soil bacterial competition network.

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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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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centro de Investigaciones Sobre Desertificación (CIDE), CSIC-UV-GV, Moncada, Spain

    Miguel Verdú

  2. Departamento de Biología Animal, Biología Vegetal y Ecología, Universidad de Jaén, Jaén, Spain

    Julio M. Alcántara

  3. Instituto Interuniversitario de Investigación del Sistema Tierra en Andalucía, Granada, Spain

    Julio M. Alcántara

  4. Departamento de Medio Ambiente y Agronomía, Instituto Nacional de Investigación y Tecnología Agraria y Alimentaria (INIA), CSIC, Madrid, Spain

    Jose A. Navarro-Cano & Marta Goberna

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  1. Miguel Verdú
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  2. Julio M. Alcántara
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  3. Jose A. Navarro-Cano
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  4. Marta Goberna
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Contributions

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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Correspondence to Marta Goberna.

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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

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