Analysis of Ecological Networks in Multicomponent Communities of Microorganisms: Possibilities, Limitations, and Potential Errors

Owing to the high resolving power and efficiency of DNA sequencing, researchers have discovered the extremely high diversity of bacterial, fungal, protist, and microinvertebrate communities in the soil, wood, phyllosphere, and other natural media. Studies on the properties of these communities require powerful tools for analyzing multicomponent systems. One of them is the analysis of ecological networks, which makes it possible to solve a broad range of problems. This review briefly describes the possibilities of network analysis, its concepts, and metrics of network topology.It also indicates limitations related to specific features of DNA sequencing (compositionality and data sparsity) and potential sources of errors in the interpretation of results (relic DNA, artifactual DNA sequences and spurious connections in a network). The focus is on the communities of microorganisms, but the discussed issues are relevant for most other groups of the biota.