View article

The ecological forces that govern the assembly and stability of the human gut microbiota remain unresolved. We developed a generalizable model‐guided framework to predict higher‐dimensional consortia from time‐resolved measurements of lower‐order assemblages. This method was employed to decipher microbial interactions in a diverse human gut microbiome synthetic community. We show that pairwise interactions are major drivers of multi‐species community dynamics, as opposed to higher‐order interactions. The inferred ecological network exhibits a high proportion of negative and frequent positive interactions. Ecological drivers and responsive recipient species were discovered in the network. Our model demonstrated that a prevalent positive and negative interaction topology enables robust coexistence by implementing a negative feedback loop that balances disparities in monospecies fitness …