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Fig. 3 | BMC Ecology and Evolution

Fig. 3

From: On the effect of inheritance of microbes in commensal microbiomes

Fig. 3

Average microbial load in hosts under microbial inheritance. A Starting from a condition where all hosts are initially empty, the average frequency of microbes in hosts increases through time before reaching an equilibrium. In this particular case, inheritance makes such equilibrium abundance larger only when hosts are occupied rapidly, \(\alpha _0 \rightarrow 0\). This increase results from a host distribution where higher microbial loads are more common (Fig. 2B). The cases shown in (A), with parameters of immigration \(m=10^{-2}\), host death \(\tau =10^{-4}\), and carrying capacity \(N=10^{5}\), are indicated by the triangles in (BD). A single parameter is varying in (BD). B Changes of migration from the pool of colonizers, m, have minimal effect (notice the scale). As \(m \rightarrow 1\), more microbes colonize the hosts. Still the average microbial load only increases if the loss of microbes to inheritance is less than the gain from proliferation. (C) The effect of changes to host death probability, \(\tau\), are much larger and maximal at intermediate \(\tau\). A faster occupation of hosts makes the effect of inheritance larger for shorter living hosts, \(\tau \rightarrow 1\). D In contrast to the occurrence (Fig. 2E), changes in the carrying capacity for microbes, N, have a larger intermediate effect. Faster occupation of hosts makes the effect peak for larger N. Points and bars in (BD) indicate the average and standard deviation of 6 simulation pairs, with vs. without inheritance, with \(10^4\) hosts each. Offspring receive \(9\%\) of their parent’s microbiome on average, \(a_i = 0\) and \(b_i = 9\) in Eq. (4). The whole distributions are shown in Additional file 1: Fig. S2

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