Ecological stability emerges at the level of strains in the human gut microbiome

We are very excited to share our latest manuscript entitled Ecological stability emerges at the level of strains in the human gut microbiome. To date, there has been an intensive focus on quantifying ecological dynamics from gut mirobiome data at the species level using 16S amplicon data. However, each species within hosts can be comprised of multiple strains, and it is not clear whether this ecological stability that is observed at the species level can extend down to the strain level. Here we quantify this and find that strains are indeed stable ecological units whose fluctuations in frequencies over time can be described by macroecological laws.