Ecological Stability Emerges at the Level of Strains in the Human Gut Microbiome

Abstract

The human gut microbiome harbors substantial ecological diversity at the species level, as well as at the strain level within species. In healthy hosts, species abundance fluctuations in the microbiome are thought to be stable, and these fluctuations can be described by macroecological laws. However, it is less clear how strain abundances change over time. An open question is whether individual strains behave like species themselves, exhibiting stability and following the macroecological relationships known to hold at the species level, or whether strains have different dynamics, perhaps due to the relatively close phylogenetic relatedness of co-colonizing lineages. Here, we analyze the daily dynamics of intra-specific genetic variation in the gut microbiomes of four healthy, densely longitudinally sampled hosts. First, we find that overall genetic diversity in a large majority of species is stationary over time, despite short-term fluctuations. Next, we show that fluctuations in abundances in approximately 80% of strains analyzed can be predicted with a stochastic logistic model (SLM)--an ecological model of a population experiencing environmental fluctuations around a fixed carrying capacity which has previously been shown to capture statistical properties of species abundance fluctuations. The success of this model indicates that strain abundances typically fluctuate around a fixed carrying capacity, suggesting that most strains are dynamically stable. Finally, we find that the strain abundances follow several empirical macroecological laws known to hold at the species level. Together, our results suggest that macroecological properties of the human gut microbiome, including its stability, emerge at the level of strains.