Development of a Method Identifying Key Players of the Microorganisms' World

Keystone taxa is a species that plays an especially important role in the stability of its ecosystem. Currently, identifying a keystone taxa using high-throughput sequencing data is a particularly challenging process. In addition, while most microbial interaction models assume pair-wise relationships, it is yet unclear whether pair-wise interactions dominate the system. Dr. Amir Bashan from the Physics Department at Bar Ilan University, together with his Ph.D. student Dr. Guy Amit developed a new method which detects keystone taxa by their total influence on the rest of the community, without assuming a priori knowledge of pair-wise interactions or any other specific dynamics. When the method was applied to sequences of the human gastrointestinal microbiome, the researchers identified a set of candidate keystones and found that they are often part of a keystone module - a group of species with high correlation of presence-absence patterns. The work of Dr. Bashan and Dr. Amit, published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications, is a big step towards the reliable identification of key players of complex microbial communities.

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