Minorities drive growth resumption in cross-feeding microbial communities.

ABSTRACT: Microbial communities are fundamental to life on Earth. Different strains within these communities are often connected by a highly connected metabolic network, where the growth of one strain depends on the metabolic activities of other community members. While distributed metabolic functions allow microbes to reduce costs and optimize metabolic pathways, they make them metabolically dependent. Here, we hypothesize that such dependencies can be detrimental in situations where the external conditions change rapidly, as they often do in natural environments. After a shift in external conditions, microbes need to remodel their metabolism, but they can only resume growth once partners on which they depend have also adapted to the new conditions. It is currently not well understood how microbial

SUBMITTER: Micali G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10636363 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature