Understanding how environmental factors affect microbial survival is an important open problem in microbial ecology. Patterns of microbial community structure have been characterized across a wide range of different environmental settings, but the mechanisms generating these patterns remain poorly understood. Here, we use mathematical modelling to investigate fundamental connections between chemical power supply to a system and patterns of microbial survival. We reveal a complex set of interdependences between power supply and distributions of survival probability across microbial habitats, in a case without interspecific resource competition. We also find that different properties determining power supply, such as substrate fluxes and Gibbs energies of reactions, affect microbial survival in fundamentally different ways. Moreover, we show how simple connections between power supply and growth can give rise to complex patterns of microbial survival across physicochemical gradients, such as pH gradients. Our findings show the importance of taking energy fluxes into account in order to reveal fundamental connections between microbial survival and environmental conditions, and to obtain a better understanding of microbial population dynamics in natural environments.

了解环境因素如何影响微生物生存是微生物生态学中一个重要的开放性问题。微生物群落结构的模式已在广泛的不同环境设置中得到表征，但产生这些模式的机制仍知之甚少。在这里，我们使用数学模型来研究系统的化学电源与微生物生存模式之间的基本联系。在没有种间资源竞争的情况下，我们揭示了电源供应与微生物栖息地的生存概率分布之间的一组复杂的相互依赖关系。我们还发现，决定电源的不同特性，如底物通量和吉布斯反应能，以完全不同的方式影响微生物的生存。而且，我们展示了电源和生长之间的简单联系如何在物理化学梯度（例如 pH 梯度）中产生复杂的微生物生存模式。我们的研究结果表明，为了揭示微生物生存与环境条件之间的基本联系，并更好地了解自然环境中的微生物种群动态，考虑能量通量的重要性。