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Peer-reviewedCC BY-NC-NDNature Microbiology

Predictable shifts in microbial species composition lead to community-wide robustness to environmental stress

  • Jana S. Huisman1
  • Martina Dal Bello2,3,4,5
  • Jeff Gore4
5 affiliations
  1. 1Physics of Living Systems, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA. [email protected]
  2. 2Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
  3. 3Microbial Sciences Institute, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
  4. 4Physics of Living Systems, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
  5. 5Quantitative Biology Institute, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
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Abstract

Environmental stress reduces species growth rates, but how it impacts microbial community function is less clear. Here we experimentally demonstrate that increasing salinity stress shifts community composition towards species with higher growth rates. This shift leads the mean community growth rate to be more robust to increasing stress than the growth of individual species. We demonstrate this by propagating natural aquatic communities at multiple salinities and mapping the observed diversity onto the measured salinity performance curves of more than 80 bacterial isolates. We validated these results with pairwise in vitro species competitions and using 16S data of microbial communities from estuarine environments. A generalized Lotka-Volterra model including mortality and salinity-dependent growth rates recapitulates the observed robustness of community growth sustained by more abundant faster growers at high salinity. These results could be extended to other environmental stressors, pointing to a fundamental mechanism with which communities maintain growth despite deteriorating conditions.

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Cite

BibTeXRIS
BibTeX
@article{huisman2026predictable,
  title = {{Predictable shifts in microbial species composition lead to community-wide robustness to environmental stress}},
  author = {Jana S. Huisman and Martina Dal Bello and Jeff Gore},
  journal = {Nature Microbiology},
  year = {2026},
  month = jul,
  doi = {10.1038/s41564-026-02422-3},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-026-02422-3},
  note = {CC BY-NC-ND},
}
RIS
TY  - JOUR
TI  - Predictable shifts in microbial species composition lead to community-wide robustness to environmental stress
AU  - Jana S. Huisman
AU  - Martina Dal Bello
AU  - Jeff Gore
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/07/17
JO  - Nature Microbiology
DO  - 10.1038/s41564-026-02422-3
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-026-02422-3
AB  - Environmental stress reduces species growth rates, but how it impacts microbial community function is less clear. Here we experimentally demonstrate that increasing salinity stress shifts community composition towards species with higher growth rates. This shift leads the mean community growth rate to be more robust to increasing stress than the growth of individual species. We demonstrate this by propagating natural aquatic communities at multiple salinities and mapping the observed diversity onto the measured salinity performance curves of more than 80 bacterial isolates. We validated these results with pairwise in vitro species competitions and using 16S data of microbial communities from estuarine environments. A generalized Lotka-Volterra model including mortality and salinity-dependent growth rates recapitulates the observed robustness of community growth sustained by more abundant faster growers at high salinity. These results could be extended to other environmental stressors, pointing to a fundamental mechanism with which communities maintain growth despite deteriorating conditions.
SN  - 2058-5276
ER  -