Temperature is one of the fundamental environmental variables that determine the composition and function of microbial communities. However, a predictive understanding of how microbial communities respond to changes in temperature is lacking, partly because it is not obvious which aspects of microbial physiology determine whether a species could benefit from a change in the temperature. Here we incorporate how microbial growth rates change with temperature into a modified Lotka-Volterra competition model and predict that higher temperatures should-in general-favour the slower-growing species in a bacterial community. We experimentally confirm this prediction in pairwise cocultures assembled from a diverse set of species and show that these changes to pairwise outcomes with temperature are also predictive of changing outcomes in three-species communities, suggesting that our theory may be applicable to more-complex assemblages. Our results demonstrate that it is possible to predict how bacterial communities will shift with temperature knowing only the growth rates of the community members. These results provide a testable hypothesis for future studies of more-complex natural communities and we hope that this work will help to bridge the gap between ecological theory and the complex dynamics observed in metagenomic surveys.

中文翻译：

---

较高的温度通常有利于多物种群落中生长较慢的细菌物种。

温度是决定微生物群落组成和功能的基本环境变量之一。然而，缺乏对微生物群落如何响应温度变化的预测性理解，部分原因是微生物生理学的哪些方面决定一个物种是否可以从温度变化中受益并不明显。在这里，我们将微生物生长速率如何随温度变化纳入改进的 Lotka-Volterra 竞争模型，并预测较高的温度通常应该有利于细菌群落中生长较慢的物种。我们在由一组不同物种组装而成的成对共培养中通过实验证实了这一预测，并表明这些成对结果随温度的变化也可以预测三个物种群落的结果变化，这表明我们的理论可能适用于更复杂的组合。我们的结果表明，仅知道群落成员的增长率，就可以预测细菌群落如何随温度变化。这些结果为未来对更复杂的自然群落的研究提供了一个可检验的假设，我们希望这项工作将有助于弥合生态理论与宏基因组调查中观察到的复杂动力学之间的差距。我们的结果表明，仅知道群落成员的增长率，就可以预测细菌群落如何随温度变化。这些结果为未来对更复杂的自然群落的研究提供了一个可检验的假设，我们希望这项工作将有助于弥合生态理论与宏基因组调查中观察到的复杂动力学之间的差距。我们的结果表明，仅知道群落成员的增长率，就可以预测细菌群落如何随温度变化。这些结果为未来对更复杂的自然群落的研究提供了一个可检验的假设，我们希望这项工作将有助于弥合生态理论与宏基因组调查中观察到的复杂动力学之间的差距。