During the last decades macroecology has identified broad-scale patterns of abundances and diversity of microbial communities and put forward some potential explanations for them. However, these advances are not paralleled by a full understanding of the dynamical processes behind them. In particular, abundance fluctuations over metagenomic samples are found to be correlated, but reproducing populations through appropriate population models remains still an open task. The present paper tackles this problem and points to species interactions as a necessary mechanism to account for them. Specifically, we discuss several possibilities to include interactions in population models and recognize Lotka-Volterra constants as successful ansatz. We design a Bayesian inference algorithm to obtain sets of interaction constants able to reproduce the experimental correlation distributions much better than the state-of-the-art attempts. Importantly, the model still reproduces single-species, experimental, macroecological patterns previously detected in the literature, concerning the abundance fluctuations across both species and communities. Endorsed by the agreement with the observed phenomenology, our analysis provides insights on the properties of microbial interactions, and suggests their sparsity as a necessary feature to balance the emergence of different patterns.

翻译：近几十年来，宏观生态学发现了微生物群落丰度与多样性的宏观尺度模式，并提出了若干潜在解释。然而，这些进展并未完全阐明其背后的动态过程。特别是，宏基因组样本中的丰度波动被发现具有相关性，但通过合适的种群模型再现这些种群仍是一项开放任务。本文针对这一问题展开研究，指出物种相互作用是解释这些现象的必要机制。具体而言，我们探讨了在种群模型中引入相互作用的若干可能性，并确认Lotka-Volterra常数是一种成功的假设。我们设计了一种贝叶斯推断算法，以获取一组相互作用常数，其能够比现有最优方法更好地再现实验相关性分布。重要的是，该模型仍能再现文献中先前检测到的、关于物种间及群落间丰度波动的单物种实验宏观生态模式。在观测现象学一致性的支持下，我们的分析为微生物相互作用的特性提供了见解，并指出其稀疏性作为平衡不同模式涌现的必要特征。