Diverse viruses and their hosts are interconnected through complex networks of infection, which are thought to influence ecological and evolutionary processes, but the principles underlying infection network structure are not well understood. Here we focus on network dimensionality and how it varies across 37 networks of viruses infecting eukaryotic phytoplankton and bacteria. We find that dimensionality is often strikingly low, with most networks being one- or two-dimensional, although dimensionality increases with network richness, suggesting that the true dimensionality of natural systems is higher. Low-dimensional networks generally exhibit a mixture of host partitioning among viruses and nestededness of host ranges. Networks of bacteria-infecting and eukaryote-infecting viruses possess comparable distributions of dimensionality and prevalence of nestedness, indicating that fundamentals of network structure are similar among domains of life and different viral lineages. The relative simplicity of many infection networks suggests that coevolutionary dynamics are often driven by a modest number of underlying mechanisms.

中文翻译：

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感染微生物真核生物和细菌的病毒之间的感染网络的维度

不同的病毒及其宿主通过复杂的感染网络相互联系，这被认为会影响生态和进化过程，但感染网络结构背后的原理尚不清楚。在这里，我们重点关注网络维度及其在感染真核浮游植物和细菌的 37 个病毒网络中的变化。我们发现维数通常非常低，大多数网络都是一维或二维的，尽管维数随着网络丰富度而增加，这表明自然系统的真实维数更高。低维网络通常表现出病毒之间的主机划分和主机范围的嵌套的混合。感染细菌和感染真核生物的病毒网络具有相似的维数分布和嵌套性普遍性，表明生命领域和不同病毒谱系之间的网络结构基本原理是相似的。许多感染网络相对简单，表明共同进化动态通常是由少量的潜在机制驱动的。