Ecological Drivers of Community Cohesion

From protocellular to societal, networks of living systems are complex and multi-scale. The assembly of these intricate interdependencies, under ecological pressures, can be nearly impossible to understand using pairwise methods. We develop a mathematical and computational model based on a four-strain Saccharomyces cerevisiae synthetic inter-dependent system. Our system leverages transiently structured ecologies for achieving community cohesion. We show how ecological interventions could reverse or slow the extinction rate of a cohesive community. An interconnected system first needs to persist long enough to be a subject of natural selection. Our emulation of Darwins warm little ponds with an ecology governed by transient compartmentalisation provides the necessary persistence. Our results find utility across scales of organisation, stressing the importance of cyclic processes in major evolutionary transitions engineering of synthetic microbial consortia and conservation biology.