Again, thanks for the thoughtful questions Sergey! I hope the answers were at least somewhat useful. I am thinking of starting a blog on our lab's website, as twitter has its limitations for things like this...

We have also hypothesized that the landscape topography can also govern the functional stability (in a dynamical sense) of communities, but whether we get to test that one anytime soon will depend on the outcome of certain european grant with an interview coming up soon... 🙃

In this context, it is reasonable to hypothesize that the topography of the landscape (i.e. how smooth it is, accessible trajectories, etc) may constrain the dynamics of community-level artificial selection, but this is still an open question (which we plan to tackle soon!).

With respect to dynamics, that is also a very good question. I tend to think about the community-function landscape in the context of community-level artificial selection, where the meaning of 'community fitness' is arbitrary...

There is certainly a lot to explore here, both empirically and theoretically...

... if so, the effect of ecological species-interactions on function may be weaker, the effect of individual taxa smaller, and a gene / trait based description of community composition may predict function better than species-level composition.

In general, interactions between species will depend on many species-level traits that are present together in different community members. It is possible though that in larger ecosystems, the same gene gets to be present in different species...

Because of this coupling, community functions will be affected by species-level interactions, & those are difficult to predict from the list of traits and genes you find in the community (and even when we know the genomes of all species independently)

Register Now for Alvaro Sanchez’s talk.
Title: Engineering Microbial Consortia By Exploring Functional Landscapes. Alvaro Sanchez Lab Centro Nacional de Biotecnología (CSIC) PODC-DISC
Workshop Registration: tinyurl.com/cells2022reg
Webcast link: tinyurl.com/cells2022YTlink
CELLS 2022: parsys.lri.fr/CELLS/

Way to go!
yaledailynews.com/blog/2022/10/2…

on the change of eLife - the journal, Peer Community In we are impressed by this move. Some thoughts 1/6

Random thought: I particularly enjoy reading (& learn the most from) papers that are 'perspectives but with data' (cc C. Brandon Ogbunu) or 'reviews but with new results'

And NIH, NSF, the ERC… with even more reason to do so and more power to drive change