Universality of human microbial dynamics

Are Microbiome community interactions most host-specific or host-independent? If it’s host-specific, intervention may fails or have unintended consequences.

we show that gut and mouth microbiomes display pronounced universal dynamics, whereas communities associated with certain skin sites are probably shaped by differences in the host environment

This paper focuses on this specific problem of determining whether the dynamics is universal or specific by examining the relationship between two measures: (i) overlap between species assemblages, and (ii) dissimilarity between abundance profiles (Jensen–Shannon divergence). The authors defined overlap measure in a way that it will not have any correlation with the dissimilarity measure in the case of non-universal dynamics.