ArticleThe ISME journal2016
Privatization of cooperative benefits stabilizes mutualistic cross-feeding interactions in spatially structured environments.
Article in The ISME journal, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 96 papers.
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Who cites it
96 citing papers in PubMed.
- Specificity and longevity of a bacterial interspecies mutual cooperation benefiting organic micropollutant biodegradation.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2026Article
- Mass spectrometry imaging reveals different allocation of the starting steps of benzalkonium biotransformation in wastewater biofilms.Communications engineering · 2026Article
- Functional and ecological drivers of bacterial interactions in glacier-fed stream biofilms.mSystems · 2026Article
- Heterogeneous responses of soil microbial communities and functions in coastal wetlands to long-term nitrogen deposition.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2026Article
- Carbon regime structures functional trait trajectories during primary succession in microorganisms.The ISME journal · 2026Article
- Influence of cell-cell distance on the ecology and evolution of microbial communities.The ISME journal · 2026Review
- Exploring cooperation among social pathogens: a computational perspective.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2026Review
- Bottleneck size drives the evolution of cooperative traits in an aggregative multicellular myxobacterium.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Infections as ecosystems: community metabolic interactions in microbial pathogenesis.Infection and immunity · 2025Review
- Mutualism between degraders and nondegraders stabilizes the function of a natural biopolymer-degrading community.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Strain-specific interspecies interactions between co-isolated pairs of Staphylococcus aureus and Helcococcus kunzii from chronic wounds.BMC microbiology · 2025Article
- Spatial population dynamics of bacterial colonies with social antibiotic resistance.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Microbial cross-feeding stabilized by segregation of a dependent mutant from its independent ancestor.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Uptake and leakage rates differentially shape community arrangement and composition of microbial consortia.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Strong segregation promotes self-destructive cooperation.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Deciphering microbial spatial organization: insights from synthetic and engineered communities.ISME communications · 2025Review
- Asymmetric metabolic adaptations undermine stability in microbial syntrophy.ISME communications · 2025Article
- Synthetic Ecosystems: From the Test Tube to the Biosphere.ACS synthetic biology · 2024Review
- Strategies and tools to construct stable and efficient artificial coculture systems as biosynthetic platforms for biomass conversion.Biotechnology for biofuels and bioproducts · 2024Review
- Adjusted bacterial cooperation in anammox community to adapt to high ammonium in wastewater treatment plant.Water research X · 2024Article
36 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Metabolic cross-feeding interactions are ubiquitous in natural microbial communities. However, it remains generally unclear whether the production and exchange of metabolites incurs fitness costs to the producing cells and if so, which ecological mechanisms can facilitate a cooperative exchange of metabolites among unrelated individuals. We hypothesized that positive assortment within structured environments can maintain mutualistic cross-feeding. To test this, we engineered Acinetobacter baylyi and Escherichia coli to reciprocally exchange essential amino acids. Interspecific coculture experiments confirmed that non-cooperating types were selectively favoured in spatially unstructured (liquid culture), yet disfavoured in spatially structured environments (agar plates). Both an individual-based model and experiments with engineered genotypes indicated that a segregation of cross-feeders and non-cooperating auxotrophs stabilized cooperative cross-feeding in spatially structured environments. Chemical imaging confirmed that auxotrophs were spatially excluded from cooperative benefits. Together, these results demonstrate that cooperative cross-feeding between different bacterial species is favoured in structured environments such as bacterial biofilms, suggesting this type of interactions might be common in natural bacterial communities.
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