Description

The tree of life is a tangled one, an evolutionary dance of hosts and their microbiomes. We can encode the rules of the dance in a grid of numbers called a matrix. Complex numbers called "eigenvalues" of this matrix then summarize crucial information about how the dance proceeds. Each plot shows how these eigenvalues change as we vary the rules of the dance. As we descend the figure we see the plots of more and more complex systems. Poetically, the plots resemble the very microbes they were meant to study.