The architecture of microbial life, investigated across scales of organization.

We live on a microbial world. The vast majority of Earth's \(\sim 10^{30}\) organisms and \(\sim 10^{12}\) species are microbes, comprising the bulk of known metabolic, genetic, and taxonomic diversity. Yet across disparate environments, we repeatedly observe the same statistical regularities in how microbial abundances are distributed across space, fluctuate over time, and ultimately comprise the diversity of communities. In Laboratoire SoMA, we leverage these regularities to investigate, predict, and, ultimately, manipulate the microbial world.

Architectonics is the word we use for our approach of paring down the seemingly complicated structure of microbial life, examining how our identified rules vary as one moves from a single strain to an entire biome. This approach is deliberately minimal. We ask how far a model with few parameters, often no more than stochastic growth with a carrying capacity, can be pushed before it fails. Failure is often the interesting part, as it is where unexplained physiology, ecology, and evolutionary history leave their signatures and reveal our ignorance. This rigorous approach ultimately provides justification for the level of granularity necessary to understand a phenomenon.

Our work lies between macroecology, community ecology, and population genetics, with our overarching approach inspired by principles and tools from statistical physics. We are a young lab and most of our work will be computational, though we intend to perform targeted experiments on the physiological and evolutionary consequences of life-history strategies.

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