ArticlePLoS computational biology2016
Pervasive Selection for Cooperative Cross-Feeding in Bacterial Communities.
Article in PLoS computational biology, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 61 papers.
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Who cites it
61 citing papers in PubMed.
- How the social lives of bacteria affect their pangenome.Essays in biochemistry · 2026Review
- Factors influencing gut microbial colonization: A host-microbe-environment interaction perspective.Current research in food science · 2026Review
- Neutral theory of cooperative dynamics.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Strengthen or Weaken: Evolutionary Directions of Cross-Feeding After Formation.Environmental microbiology reports · 2025Review
- Competition and cooperation: The plasticity of bacterial interactions across environments.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Vitamin biosynthesis in the gut: interplay between mammalian host and its resident microbiota.Microbiology and molecular biology reviews : MMBR · 2025Review
- Habitat filtering more than microbiota origin controls microbiome transplant outcomes in soil.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Microbial cross-feeding stabilized by segregation of a dependent mutant from its independent ancestor.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Asymmetric metabolic adaptations undermine stability in microbial syntrophy.ISME communications · 2025Article
- Article
- Interactions between Pseudomonas aeruginosa and six opportunistic pathogens cover a broad spectrum from mutualism to antagonism.Environmental microbiology reports · 2024Article
- Cross-biome microbial networks reveal functional redundancy and suggest genome reduction through functional complementarity.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Tuning interdomain conjugation to enablemSystems · 2024Article
- Short-Chain Fatty Acids and Human Health: From Metabolic Pathways to Current Therapeutic Implications.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Formation of a constructed microbial community in a nutrient-rich environment indicates bacterial interspecific competition.mSystems · 2024Article
- Modeling Dynamics of Human Gut Microbiota Derived from Gluten Metabolism: Obtention, Maintenance and Characterization of Complex Microbial Communities.International journal of molecular sciences · 2024Article
- The human gut metacommunity as a conceptual aid in the development of precision medicine.Frontiers in microbiology · 2024Article
- Minorities drive growth resumption in cross-feeding microbial communities.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Spontaneously established syntrophic yeast communities improve bioproduction.Nature chemical biology · 2023Article
- Cross-feeding in the gut microbiome: Ecology and mechanisms.Cell host & microbe · 2023Review
1 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.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Bacterial communities are taxonomically highly diverse, yet the mechanisms that maintain this diversity remain poorly understood. We hypothesized that an obligate and mutual exchange of metabolites, as is very common among bacterial cells, could stabilize different genotypes within microbial communities. To test this, we developed a cellular automaton to model interactions among six empirically characterized genotypes that differ in their ability and propensity to produce amino acids. By systematically varying intrinsic (i.e. benefit-to-cost ratio) and extrinsic parameters (i.e. metabolite diffusion level, environmental amino acid availability), we show that obligate cross-feeding of essential metabolites is selected for under a broad range of conditions. In spatially structured environments, positive assortment among cross-feeders resulted in the formation of cooperative clusters, which limited exploitation by non-producing auxotrophs, yet allowed them to persist at the clusters' periphery. Strikingly, cross-feeding helped to maintain genotypic diversity within populations, while amino acid supplementation to the environment decoupled obligate interactions and favored auxotrophic cells that saved amino acid production costs over metabolically autonomous prototrophs. Together, our results suggest that spatially structured environments and limited nutrient availabilities should facilitate the evolution of metabolic interactions, which can help to maintain genotypic diversity within natural microbial populations.
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