Modeling microbial cross-feeding at intermediate scale portrays community dynamics and species coexistence.

ABSTRACT: Social interaction between microbes can be described at many levels of details: from the biochemistry of cell-cell interactions to the ecological dynamics of populations. Choosing an appropriate level to model microbial communities without losing generality remains a challenge. Here we show that modeling cross-feeding interactions at an intermediate level between genome-scale metabolic models of individual species and consumer-resource models of ecosystems is suitable to experimental data. We applied our modeling framework to three published examples of multi-strain Escherichia coli communities with increasing complexity: uni-, bi-, and multi-directional cross-feeding of either substitutable metabolic byproducts or essential nutrients. The intermediate-scale model accurately fit empirical

SUBMITTER: Liao C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7480867 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature