Artificial selection of communities drives the emergence of structured interactions

Understand

Species-rich communities, such as the microbiota or microbial ecosystems, provide key functions for human health and climatic resilience.

• Increasing effort is being dedicated to design experimental protocols for selecting community-level functions of interest.
• These experiments typically involve selection acting on populations of communities, each of which is composed of multiple species.
• If numerical simulations started to explore the evolutionary dynamics of this complex, multi-scale system, a comprehensive theoretical understanding of the process of artificial selection of communities is still lacking.