Modeling microbial cross-feeding at intermediate scale portrays community dynamics and species coexistence Journal Article
| Authors: | Liao, C.; Wang, T.; Maslov, S.; Xavier, J. B. |
| Article Title: | Modeling microbial cross-feeding at intermediate scale portrays community dynamics and species coexistence |
| Abstract: | Social interaction between microbes can be described at many levels of details: from the biochemistry of cell-cell interactions to the ecological dynamics of populations. Choosing an appropriate level to model microbial communities without losing generality remains a challenge. Here we show that modeling cross-feeding interactions at an intermediate level between genome-scale metabolic models of individual species and consumer-resource models of ecosystems is suitable to experimental data. We applied our modeling framework to three published examples of multi-strain Escherichia coli communities with increasing complexity: uni-, bi-, and multi-directional cross-feeding of either substitutable metabolic byproducts or essential nutrients. The intermediate-scale model accurately fit empirical data and quantified metabolic exchange rates that are hard to measure experimentally, even for a complex community of 14 amino acid auxotrophies. By studying the conditions of species coexistence, the ecological outcomes of cross-feeding interactions, and each community’s robustness to perturbations, we extracted new quantitative insights from these three published experimental datasets. Our analysis provides a foundation to quantify cross-feeding interactions from experimental data, and highlights the importance of metabolic exchanges in the dynamics and stability of microbial communities. Copyright: © 2020 Liao et al |
| Keywords: | nonhuman; feeding; quantitative analysis; escherichia coli; consumer; nutrient; microbial community; auxotrophy; community dynamics; human; article; species coexistence |
| Journal Title: | PLoS Computational Biology |
| Volume: | 16 |
| Issue: | 8 |
| ISSN: | 1553-7358 |
| Publisher: | Public Library of Science |
| Date Published: | 2020-08-18 |
| Start Page: | e1008135 |
| Language: | English |
| DOI: | 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008135 |
| PUBMED: | 32810127 |
| PROVIDER: | scopus |
| PMCID: | PMC7480867 |
| DOI/URL: | |
| Notes: | Article -- Source: Scopus |
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