Microbial coexistence through chemical-mediated interactions

Abstract

Many microbial functions happen within communities of interacting species. Explaining how species with disparate growth rates can coexist is important for applications such as manipulating host-associated microbiota or engineering industrial communities. Here, we ask how microbes interacting through their chemical environment can achieve coexistence in a continuous growth setup (similar to an industrial bioreactor or gut microbiota) where external resources are being supplied. We formulate and experimentally constrain a model in which mediators of interactions (e.g. metabolites or waste-products) are explicitly incorporated. Our model highlights facilitation and self-restraint as interactions that contribute to coexistence, consistent with our intuition. When interactions are strong, we observe that coexistence is determined primarily by the topology of facilitation and inhibition influences not their strengths. Importantly, we show that consumption or degradation of chemical mediators moderates interaction strengths and promotes coexistence. Our results offer insights into how to build or restructure microbial communities of interest.

The Role of Gut Microbiota and Environmental Factors in Type 1 Diabetes Pathogenesis

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“…Direct competition for resources is only one of the many known interactions that can take place between microbial species: exchange of metabolic byproducts 14 , production of toxins 13 and environmental conditioning 35 are only a few of the ways in which we know microbes interact within a community. Each of these processes provide both growth benefits and proteomic costs to microbial species, and can in principle be included in our framework by appropriately taking into account how they affect proteome allocation and species' fitness.…”

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