Marine Science Faculty Publications
Power Law Rank–abundance Models for Marine Phage Communities
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2007
Keywords
power law, kill the winner, neutral evolution, metagenomics, rank–abundance, generalized Lotka–Volterra
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1574-6968.2007.00790.x
Abstract
Metagenomic analyses suggest that the rank–abundance curve for marine phage communities follows a power law distribution. A new type of power law dependence based on a simple model in which a modified version of Lotka–Volterra predator–prey dynamics is sampled uniformly in time is presented. Biologically, the model embodies a kill the winner hypothesis and a neutral evolution hypothesis. The model can match observed power law distributions and uses very few parameters that are readily identifiable and characterize phage ecosystems. The model makes new untested predictions: (1) it is unlikely that the most abundant phage genotype will be the same at different time points and (2) the long-term decay of isolated phage populations follows a power law.
Was this content written or created while at USF?
Yes
Citation / Publisher Attribution
FEMS Microbiology Letters, v. 273, issue 2, p. 224–228
Scholar Commons Citation
Karl, Karl Heinz; Rodriguez-Brito, Beltran; Breitbart, Mya; Bangor, David; Angly, Florent; Felts, Ben; Nulton, James; Rohwer, Forest; and Salamon, Peter, "Power Law Rank–abundance Models for Marine Phage Communities" (2007). Marine Science Faculty Publications. 779.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/msc_facpub/779
