ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
Toxicity drives facilitation between 4 bacterial species.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 139 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
139 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Biodiversity promotes ecosystem functioning despite environmental change.Ecology letters · 2022Pooled it
- Cross-feeding enables robust coexistence between four bacterial species.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Adaxial-abaxial leaf surface asymmetry is a key ecological driver of the phyllosphere microbiome.Journal of experimental botany · 2026Article
- Host-initiated microbial association leads to stable ectosymbiosis in an ecological model.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Impact of acetaminophen on the growth kinetics and metabolite production of probiotic lactic acid bacteria.Biotechnology letters · 2026Article
- Bacterial degradation of a plant toxin and nutrient competition with commensals trade off to constrain pathogen growth.mSystems · 2026Article
- Quartet: Disentangling positive and negative components of microbial interactions.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Functional and ecological drivers of bacterial interactions in glacier-fed stream biofilms.mSystems · 2026Article
- Normative assembly rule reveals fairness in microbial communities.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Minimizing co-growth as a broad predictor of community robustness.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Mathematical Modelling and Intuition in Microbiology: A Perspective.Environmental microbiology · 2026Review
- Format-Preserving Reduction of Canonical Nonlinear Models.Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2026Article
- A Concept Using α-Niche Evolution Within Bacterial Communities to Direct β-Niche Evolution of Focal Species.Environmental microbiology · 2026Article
- Host Evolutionary Lineage Shapes Assembly, Network Topology, and Metabolic Potential of Coral Skeletal Endolithic Microbiomes.Microorganisms · 2026Article
- Environmental complexity shapes maintenance of bacterial diversity through context-dependent interactions among niche axes.The ISME journal · 2026Article
- Temperature alters interactions and keystone taxa in the marine microbiome.The ISME journal · 2026Article
- Ecological drift simulations reveal key factors influencing minimal microbiome engineering and community assembly.ISME communications · 2026Article
- Sustainable rewilding of urban spaces increases microbial diversity.Sustainable microbiology · 2026Article
- Bacterial community adaptation after brackish and freshwater coalescence.ISME communications · 2026Article
- Substrate toxicity drives successive range expansions opposing spatial intermixing in cross-feeding consortia.ISME communications · 2026Article
79 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Competition between microbes is extremely common, with many investing in mechanisms to harm other strains and species. Yet positive interactions between species have also been documented. What makes species help or harm each other is currently unclear. Here, we studied the interactions between 4 bacterial species capable of degrading metal working fluids (MWF), an industrial coolant and lubricant, which contains growth substrates as well as toxic biocides. We were surprised to find only positive or neutral interactions between the 4 species. Using mathematical modeling and further experiments, we show that positive interactions in this community were likely due to the toxicity of MWF, whereby each species' detoxification benefited the others by facilitating their survival, such that they could grow and degrade MWF better when together. The addition of nutrients, the reduction of toxicity, or the addition of more species instead resulted in competitive behavior. Our work provides support to the stress gradient hypothesis by showing how harsh, toxic environments can strongly favor facilitation between microbial species and mask underlying competitive interactions.
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