Powerful physics tool could help scientists understand complex ecosystems

Your gut is home to microbial madness. Hundreds of trillions of bacteria belonging to countless species interact with one another in complex ways that can both keep you healthy and cause disease . Teasing out these interactions would seem an impossible task. Now, microbiologists have found help from an unlikely source: physics. A new experiment suggests a powerful concept known as a phase transition can predict how complex ecosystems—like those composed of the bacteria in your belly—behave. The finding could help us keep our guts healthy and even protect other complex ecosystems such as rainforests and coral reefs. “It’s a beautiful piece of work,” says Fernanda Pinheiro, a physicist who studies bacterial ecology and physiology at the Human Technopole, who was not involved with the work. A phase transition in physics works like this: Everything you really need to know about huge collections of particles—whether the 10 23 molecules in a glass of water are liquid or solid, for example, or whether the countless atoms in a metal will arrange themselves into a magnet—is often controlled by a few simple factors, such as temperature and pressure. Theorists as far back as the 1970s have similarly suggested two factors—the total number of species and the strength of interactions between species—could predict whether complex living systems, such as the thousands of species in a rainforest, will remain stable . But ...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news