DKI

"An efficient method to systematically identify keystone species in microbial communities is still lacking. Here we propose a data-driven keystone species identification (DKI) framework based on deep learning to resolve this challenge. 

"Our key idea is to implicitly learn the assembly rules of microbial communities from a particular habitat by training a deep-learning model using microbiome samples collected from this habitat. 

"The well-trained deep-learning model enables us to quantify the community-specific keystoneness of each species in any microbiome sample from this habitat by conducting a thought experiment on species removal. 

"We systematically validated this DKI framework using synthetic data and applied DKI to analyse real data. 

"We found that those taxa with high median keystoneness across different communities display strong community specificity."