bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/347948; this version posted June 16, 2018. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC 4.0 International license. Interactions in self-assembled microbial communities saturate with diversity Xiaoqian Yu1, Martin F. Polz2*, Eric J. Alm2,3,4,5* 1. Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA 2. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA 3. Department of Biological Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA 4. Center for Microbiome Informatics and Therapeutics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA 5. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA *Correspondence should be addressed to: E.J.A. (
[email protected]) or M.F.P. (
[email protected]) Abstract How the diversity of organisms competing for or sharing resources influences community production is an important question in ecology but has rarely been explored in natural microbial communities. These generally contain large numbers of species making it difficult to disentangle how the effects of different interactions scale with diversity. Here, we show that changing diversity affects measures of community function in relatively simple communities but that increasing richness beyond a threshold has little detectable effect. We generated self-assembled communities with a wide range of diversity by growth of cells from serially diluted seawater on brown algal leachate. We subsequently isolated the most abundant taxa from these communities via dilution-to-extinction in order to compare productivity functions of the entire community to those of individual taxa.