Stochasticity constrained by deterministic effects of diet and age drive rumen microbiome assembly dynamics

How complex communities assemble through the animal’s life, and how predictable the process is remains unexplored. Here, we investigate the forces that drive the assembly of rumen microbiomes throughout a cow’s life, with emphasis on the balance between stochastic and deterministic processes. We analyse the development of the rumen microbiome from birth to adulthood using 16S-rRNA amplicon sequencing data and find that the animals shared a group...