Costless metabolic secretions as drivers of interspecies interactions in microbial ecosystems.

ABSTRACT: Metabolic exchange mediates interactions among microbes, helping explain diversity in microbial communities. As these interactions often involve a fitness cost, it is unclear how stable cooperation can emerge. Here we use genome-scale metabolic models to investigate whether the release of "costless" metabolites (i.e. those that cause no fitness cost to the producer), can be a prominent driver of intermicrobial interactions. By performing over 2 million pairwise growth simulations of 24 species in a combinatorial assortment of environments, we identify a large space of metabolites that can be secreted without cost, thus generating ample cross-feeding opportunities. In addition to providing an atlas of putative interactions, we show that anoxic conditions can promote mutualisms by providing

SUBMITTER: Pacheco AR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6327061 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature