ArticleThe ISME journal2014
Fitness and stability of obligate cross-feeding interactions that emerge upon gene loss in bacteria.
Article in The ISME journal, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 157 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
157 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 337 citations in OpenAlex.
- Individualized recovery of gut microbial strains post antibiotics.NPJ biofilms and microbiomesPooled it
- Engineering an asymmetric cross-feeding consortium inSynthetic and systems biotechnology · 2026Article
- Amino acid availability influences Staphylococcus aureus interaction with the nasal microbiota in a strain- and community-specific manner.Microbiome · 2026Article
- Challenges and Future Directives of Synthetic Biology in Engineering Plant-Microbe Partnerships for Sustainable Agriculture.Biotechnology and bioengineering · 2026Review
- Emergent phenotypic heterogeneity in synthetic cross-feeding consortia driven by heterogeneous metabolite distribution.National science review · 2026Article
- Reciprocal cross-feeding between bacteria can limit the emergence of metabolic dependencies.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2026Article
- Towards Key Principles of Host-Associated Microbiome Assembly.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Low initial metabolite production enhances stability in syntrophic bacterial consortia.Communications biology · 2026Article
- The network structure of cross-feeding impacts microbial community diversity under growth-inhibiting stresses.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Experimental Sodalis infection eliminates ancient insect symbiont.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Limits to the evolution of metabolic dependency in spatially structured microbial communities.iScience · 2026Article
- Microbial interactions in facilitating antibiotic activity and resistance evolution.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2026Review
- Bacteriophage-mediated cell lysis externalizes a metabolically valuable nutrient to broadly modulate bacterial communities.The ISME journal · 2026Article
- Single-cell assembled genomes predict enhanced bacterial metabolic cross-feeding potential in carbon-enriched soils.The ISME journal · 2026Article
- Autonomously Replicating Sequence-Bearing Plasmids Utilized in Pichia pastoris.Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2026Article
- Bacterial mutation dynamics emerging insights into virulence evolution and drug resistance. A review study.Frontiers in medicine · 2026Review
- Microbial model communities exhibit widespread metabolic interdependencies.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Accuracy of the Lotka-Volterra model fails in strongly coupled microbial consumer-resource systems.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Understanding the development of bacterial colony: Physiology, new technology, and modeling.Quantitative biology (Beijing, China) · 2025Review
- Metabolic interplay drives population cycles in a cross-feeding microbial community.Nature communications · 2025Article
97 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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 to a division of metabolic labour: the fitness cost of overproducing amino acids was less than the benefit of not having to produce others when they were provided by their partner. Moreover, frequency-dependent selection maintained cross-feeding consortia and limited exploitation by non-cooperating competitors. Together, our synthetic study approach reveals ecological principles that can help explain the widespread occurrence of obligate metabolic cross-feeding interactions in nature.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.