ArticleThe ISME journal2021
Population dynamics of microbial cross-feeding are determined by co-localization probabilities and cooperation-independent cheater growth.
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 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Engineering an asymmetric cross-feeding consortium inSynthetic and systems biotechnology · 2026Article
- Emergent phenotypic heterogeneity in synthetic cross-feeding consortia driven by heterogeneous metabolite distribution.National science review · 2026Article
- Controlling spatial structure in minimal microbial communities by sequential capillary assembly.Lab on a chip · 2026Article
- Spatial structure: shaping the ecology and evolution of microbial communities.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2026Review
- Deciphering microbial interactions using a label-free microbead sorting approach.ISME communications · 2026Article
- Microbial metabolism in deep terrestrial subsurface communities - amino acids as biosignatures.Current research in microbial sciences · 2026Article
- Strengthen or Weaken: Evolutionary Directions of Cross-Feeding After Formation.Environmental microbiology reports · 2025Review
- Coevolutionary history of predation constrains the evolvability of antibiotic resistance in prey bacteria.npj antimicrobials and resistance · 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
- Individual-based modeling unravels spatial and social interactions in bacterial communities.The ISME journal · 2025Review
- Time of first contact determines cooperator success in a three-member microbial consortium.ISME communications · 2025Article
- Top-Down Enrichment Strategy to Co-cultivate Lactic Acid and Lignocellulolytic Bacteria From theFrontiers in microbiology · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
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Abstract
As natural selection acts on individual organisms the evolution of costly cooperation between microorganisms is an intriguing phenomenon. Introduction of spatial structure to privatize exchanged molecules can explain the evolution of cooperation. However, in many natural systems cells can also grow to low cell concentrations in the absence of these exchanged molecules, thus showing "cooperation-independent background growth". We here serially propagated a synthetic cross-feeding consortium of lactococci in the droplets of a water-in-oil emulsion, essentially mimicking group selection with varying founder population sizes. The results show that when the growth of cheaters completely depends on cooperators, cooperators outcompete cheaters. However, cheaters outcompete cooperators when they can independently grow to only ten percent of the consortium carrying capacity. This result is the consequence of a probabilistic effect, as low founder population sizes in droplets decrease the frequency of cooperator co-localization. Cooperator-enrichment can be recovered by increasing the founder population size in droplets to intermediate values. Together with mathematical modelling our results suggest that co-localization probabilities in a spatially structured environment leave a small window of opportunity for the evolution of cooperation between organisms that do not benefit from their cooperative trait when in isolation or form multispecies aggregates.
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