ArticleThe ISME journal2021
Microbial competition reduces metabolic interaction distances to the low µm-range.
Article in The ISME journal, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed.
- Directional Construction of a Synthetic Microbial Consortium for Shanxi Aged Vinegar: Metabolic Kinetics and Accelerated Formation of Major Volatile Compounds.Foods (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Article
- Low initial metabolite production enhances stability in syntrophic bacterial consortia.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Controlling spatial structure in minimal microbial communities by sequential capillary assembly.Lab on a chip · 2026Article
- Development of a high-throughput label-free method for enrichment of antimetabolite-resistant yeast strains using pico-litre agarose beads.Applied microbiology and biotechnology · 2026Article
- Influence of cell-cell distance on the ecology and evolution of microbial communities.The ISME journal · 2026Review
- Spatial structure: shaping the ecology and evolution of microbial communities.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2026Review
- Disentangling the feedback loops driving spatial patterning in microbial communities.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2025Review
- Selection for toxin production in spatially structured environments increases with growth rate.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Time of first contact determines cooperator success in a three-member microbial consortium.ISME communications · 2025Article
- Higher-order interactions and emergent properties of microbial communities: The power of synthetic ecology.Heliyon · 2024Review
- Interspecific interactions facilitate keystone species in a multispecies biofilm that promotes plant growth.The ISME journal · 2024Article
- Indirect Enrichment of Desirable, but Less Fit Phenotypes, from a Synthetic Microbial Community Using Microdroplet Confinement.ACS synthetic biology · 2023Article
- The cAMP receptor protein (CRP) enhances the competitive nature of Salmonella Typhimurium.Archives of microbiology · 2023Article
- Indirect enrichment of desirable, but less fit phenotypes, from a synthetic microbial community using microdroplet confinement.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- The space between us: Modeling spatial heterogeneity in synthetic microbial consortia dynamics.Biophysical reports · 2022Article
- Integrative biology of persister cell formation: molecular circuitry, phenotypic diversification and fitness effects.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Review
- Prevalent emergence of reciprocity among cross-feeding bacteria.ISME communications · 2022Article
- Global dynamics of microbial communities emerge from local interaction rules.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Modification of bacterial cells forFrontiers in bioengineering and biotechnology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Metabolic interactions between cells affect microbial community compositions and hence their function in ecosystems. It is well-known that under competition for the exchanged metabolite, concentration gradients constrain the distances over which interactions can occur. However, interaction distances are typically quantified in two-dimensional systems or without accounting for competition or other metabolite-removal, conditions which may not very often match natural ecosystems. We here analyze the impact of cell-to-cell distance on unidirectional cross-feeding in a three-dimensional aqueous system with competition for the exchanged metabolite. Effective interaction distances were computed with a reaction-diffusion model and experimentally verified by growing a synthetic consortium of 1 µm-sized metabolite producer, receiver, and competitor cells in different spatial structures. We show that receivers cannot interact with producers located on average 15 µm away from them, as product concentration gradients flatten close to producer cells. We developed an aggregation protocol and varied the receiver cells' product affinity, to show that within producer-receiver aggregates even low-affinity receiver cells could interact with producers. These results show that competition or other metabolite-removal of a public good in a three-dimensional system reduces metabolic interaction distances to the low µm-range, highlighting the importance of concentration gradients as physical constraint for cellular interactions.
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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.