ABSTRACT
This chapter overviews some of the methods for modelling microbial communities. Microbial communities have been modelled for two broad purposes: to understand microbial interactions in various natural communities, and to engineer microbial interactions for a particular purpose, such as metabolic engineering. A rich repertoire of mathematical and computational tools has been developed over the last decade or so, for modelling various aspects of microbial interactions in communities. These methods can be broadly classified into four paradigms: network-based, population-based, individual-based, and constraint-based modelling techniques, based on the level of abstraction, the nature of problem formulation and also the applications. Network-based approaches have been employed in two complementary strategies to understand model communities. One strategy more broadly deals with characterisation, through the construction of microbial association networks, primarily from metagenomics datasets. The other strategy involves the construction of the more familiar metabolic networks, but built to capture metabolite exchanges in communities.
