Web-gLV: A Web Based Platform for Lotka-Volterra Based Modeling and Simulation of Microbial Populations

Abstract

The affordability of high throughput DNA sequencing has allowed us to explore the dynamics of microbial populations in various ecosystems. Mathematical modeling and simulation of such microbiome time series data can help in getting better understanding of bacterial communities. In this paper, we present Web-gLV—a GUI based interactive platform for generalized Lotka-Volterra (gLV) based modeling and simulation of microbial populations. The tool can be used to generate the mathematical models with automatic estimation of parameters and use them to predict future trajectories using numerical simulations. We also demonstrate the utility of our tool on few publicly available datasets. The case studies demonstrate the ease with which the current tool can be used by biologists to model bacterial populations and simulate their dynamics to get biological insights. We expect Web-gLV to be a valuable contribution in the field of ecological modeling and metagenomic systems biology.