Genome-driven evolutionary game theory helps understand the rise of metabolic interdependencies in microbial communities.

ABSTRACT: Metabolite exchanges in microbial communities give rise to ecological interactions that govern ecosystem diversity and stability. It is unclear, however, how the rise of these interactions varies across metabolites and organisms. Here we address this question by integrating genome-scale models of metabolism with evolutionary game theory. Specifically, we use microbial fitness values estimated by metabolic models to infer evolutionarily stable interactions in multi-species microbial "games". We first validate our approach using a well-characterized yeast cheater-cooperator system. We next perform over 80,000 in silico experiments to infer how metabolic interdependencies mediated by amino acid leakage in Escherichia coli vary across 189 amino acid pairs. While most pairs display shared patte

SUBMITTER: Zomorrodi AR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5691134 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature