Background: The human gastrointestinal tract is an environment that hosts an ecosystem of URLanisms essential to human health. Vital biological processes emerge from fundamental inter- and intra-species molecular interactions that influence the assembly and composition of the gut microbiota ecology. Results: Here we quantify the complexity of the ecological relationships of the infant gut microbiota ecosystem as a function of the information contained in the non-linear associations of a sequence of increasingly-specified maximum entropy representations of the system. Our paradigm frames the ecological state  in terms of the presence or absence of an individual microbial taxonomic unit as a function of both the ecological states of its neighboring units and, departing from standard graphical model representations, the associations among the units within its neighborhood. Conclusion: We characterize the order of the system based on the relative quantity of statistical information encoded by high-order statistical associations of the infant gut microbiota.
 The human gastrointestinal tract is an environment that hosts an ecosystem of URLanisms essential to human health. Vital biological processes emerge from fundamental inter- and intra-species molecular interactions that influence the assembly and composition of the gut microbiota ecology. Here we quantify the complexity of the ecological relationships within the human infant gut microbiota ecosystem as a function of the information contained in the nonlinear associations of a sequence of increasingly-specified maximum entropy representations of the system. Our paradigm frames the ecological state , in terms of the presence or absence of individual microbial ecological units that are identified by amplicon sequence variants (ASV) in the gut microenvironment, as a function of both the ecological states of its neighboring units and, in a departure from standard graphical model representations, the associations among the units within its neighborhood. We characterize the order of the system based on the relative quantity of statistical information encoded by high-order statistical associations of the infant gut microbiota.
D
Background:
D
Results:
R
of the
within the human
R
non-linear
nonlinear
A
,
R
an individual microbial taxonomic unit
individual microbial ecological units that are identified by amplicon sequence variants (ASV) in the gut microenvironment,
R
departing
in a departure
D
Conclusion: