CT 2.2.1 Environmental regulation in simulated microbial ecosystems: using networks to integrate ecology, evolution, and environment

Much network theory research has been concerned with identifying and characterising networks in terms of their topology and various metrics such as degree distribution, connectedness, average path length, etc. More recently attention has shifted towards the processes by which networks are created and dynamically altered. A key challenge is linking the dynamics of processes operating on networks to the dynamics of network formation [1]. Here we consider the interaction of three different kinds of network structure in a simulation model of an evolving microbial ecosystem. We look at networks of feeding interactions between different microbe species, phylogenetic trees charting evolutionary lineages, and network representations of spatial structure in the environment. By observing the development of these networks over time, we are able to correlate evolutionary changes with changes in feeding network robustness and environmental state.