Ecological & Microbiome Networks

Summary

Species and microbial communities respond to one another and to their environment through complex webs of interaction. This research uses community data and network methods to identify ecological structure, temporal dynamics and potential biotic relationships.

Our collaborations span marine mycoplankton, soil protists, host-associated microbiomes and evolutionary questions. The common methodological challenge is to distinguish meaningful ecological organization from patterns produced by abundance, sampling and environmental variation.

Research directions

• Microbial community and co-occurrence networks
• Temporal and environmental dynamics of ecological systems
• Host-associated microbiomes
• Robust inference from metagenomic community data

Selected publications

📄 Kolora, S.R.R., Gysi, D.M., Schaffer, S., Grimm-Seyfarth, A., Szabolcs, M., Faria, R., Henle, K., Stadler, P.F., Schlegel, M., Nowick, K. Accelerated evolution of tissue-specific genes mediates divergence amidst gene flow in European green lizards, Genome Biology and Evolution. (2021) doi:10.1093/gbe/evab109

📄 Banos, S., Gysi, D. M., Richter-Heitmann, T., Glöckner, F. O., Boersma, M., Wiltshire, K.H., Gerdts, G., Wichels, A., Reich, M. Seasonal Dynamics of Pelagic Mycoplanktonic Communities: Interplay of Taxon Abundance, Temporal Occurrence, , Biotic Interactions, Frontiers in Microbiology. vol. 11, (2020) doi:10.3389/fmicb.2020.01305

📄 Dumack, K., Olga, F., Gysi, D. M., Jauss, R.T., Walden, S., Hüsna, O. , Wubet, T., Michael, B., Eisenhauer, N. Effects of earthworm invasion on the diversity of protists (Cercozoa: Rhizaria) in North American, Biological Invasions. (2022) https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-021-02726-x.