A Note on Extending Taylor's Power Law for Characterizing Human Microbial Communities: Inspiration from Comparative Studies on the Distribution Patterns of Insects and Galaxies, and as a Case Study for Medical Ecology (1205.3504v1)

Abstract: Many natural patterns, such as the distributions of blood particles in a blood sample, proteins on cell surfaces, biological populations in their habitat, galaxies in the universe, the sequence of human genes, and the fitness in evolutionary computing, have been found to follow power law. Taylor's power law (Taylor 1961: Nature, 189:732-) is well recognized as one of the fundamental models in population ecology. A fundamental property of biological populations, which Taylor's power law reveals, is the near universal heterogeneity of population abundance distribution in habitat. Obviously, the heterogeneity also exists at the community level, where not only the distributions of population abundances but also the proportions of the species composition in the community are often heterogeneous. Nevertheless, existing community diversity indexes such as Shannon index and Simpson index can only measure "local" or "static" diversity in the sense that they are computed for each habitat at a specific time point, and the indexes alone do not reflect the diversity changes. In this note, I propose to extend the application scope of Taylor's power law to the studies of human microbial communities, specifically, the community heterogeneity at both population and community levels. I further suggested that population dispersion models such as Taylor (1980: Nature, 286, 53-), which is known to generate population distribution patterns consistent with the power law, should also be very useful for analyzing the distribution patterns of human microbes within the human body. Overall, I hope that the approach to human microbial community with the power law offers an example that ecological theories can play an important role in the emerging medical ecology, which aims at studying the ecology of human microbiome and its implications to human diseases and health, as well as in personalized medicine.