Fitness and stability of obligate cross-feeding interactions that emerge upon gene loss in bacteria.

ABSTRACT: Cross-feeding interactions, in which bacterial cells exchange costly metabolites to the benefit of both interacting partners, are very common in the microbial world. However, it generally remains unclear what maintains this type of interaction in the presence of non-cooperating types. We investigate this problem using synthetic cross-feeding interactions: by simply deleting two metabolic genes from the genome of Escherichia coli, we generated genotypes that require amino acids to grow and release other amino acids into the environment. Surprisingly, in a vast majority of cases, cocultures of two cross-feeding strains showed an increased Darwinian fitness (that is, rate of growth) relative to prototrophic wild type cells--even in direct competition. This unexpected growth advantage was due

SUBMITTER: Pande S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3996690 | biostudies-literature | 2014 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature