ArticleEnvironmental microbiology2019
A shared limiting resource leads to competitive exclusion in a cross-feeding system.
Article in Environmental microbiology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 36 papers.
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Who cites it
36 citing papers in PubMed.
- Challenges and Future Directives of Synthetic Biology in Engineering Plant-Microbe Partnerships for Sustainable Agriculture.Biotechnology and bioengineering · 2026Review
- Decoding microbial metabolic complementarity from individual traits to community structuring.Ecology · 2026Article
- Reciprocal cross-feeding between bacteria can limit the emergence of metabolic dependencies.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2026Article
- Low initial metabolite production enhances stability in syntrophic bacterial consortia.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Bacteriophage-mediated cell lysis externalizes a metabolically valuable nutrient to broadly modulate bacterial communities.The ISME journal · 2026Article
- A microbiologist's field guide to community ecology.ISME communications · 2026Review
- How nutrient starvation impacts the gut microbiome.Nature microbiology · 2025Review
- Resource diversity and supply drive colonization resistance.PLoS computational biology · 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
- Advances in synthetic microbial ecosystems approach for studying ecological interactions and their influencing factors.Engineering microbiology · 2025Review
- Microbial cross-feeding stabilized by segregation of a dependent mutant from its independent ancestor.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Lysis of Escherichia coli by colicin Ib contributes to bacterial cross-feeding by releasing active β-galactosidase.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Phage-induced disturbance of a marine sponge microbiome.Environmental microbiome · 2024Article
- Characterizing a stable five-species microbial community for use in experimental evolution and ecology.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2024Article
- Article
- Oxidative stress changes interactions between 2 bacterial species from competitive to facilitative.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Emergent antibiotic persistence in a spatially structured synthetic microbial mutualism.The ISME journal · 2024Article
- Bacterial adenine cross-feeding stems from a purine salvage bottleneck.The ISME journal · 2024Article
- Minorities drive growth resumption in cross-feeding microbial communities.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Species interactions and coexistence are often dependent upon environmental conditions. When two cross-feeding bacteria exchange essential nutrients, the addition of a cross-fed nutrient to the environment can release one species from its dependence on the other. Previous studies suggest that continued coexistence depends on relative growth rates: coexistence is maintained if the slower-growing species is released from its dependence on the other, but if the faster-growing species is released, the slower-growing species will be lost (a hypothesis that we call 'feed the faster grower' or FFG). Using invasion-from-rare experiments with two reciprocally cross-feeding bacteria, genome-scale metabolic modelling and classical ecological models, we explored the potential for coexistence when one cross-feeder became independent. We found that whether nutrient addition shifted an interaction from mutualism to commensalism or parasitism depended on whether the nutrient that limited total growth was required by one or both species. Parasitism resulted when both species required the growth-limiting resource. Importantly, coexistence was only lost when the interaction became parasitism, and the obligate species had a slower growth rate. Under these restricted conditions, the FFG hypothesis applied. Our results contribute to a mechanistic understanding of how resources can be manipulated to alter interactions and coexistence in microbial communities.
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Registered trials
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