ArticleNature ecology & evolution2021
Obligate cross-feeding expands the metabolic niche of bacteria.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 67 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
67 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Principles for Rigorous Design and Application of Synthetic Microbial Communities.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Pooled it
- Family matters in the root microbiota.Nature microbiology · 2026Article
- Decoding microbial metabolic complementarity from individual traits to community structuring.Ecology · 2026Article
- Article
- Omics-Guided Construction of Microbial Consortia for Reproducible Traditional Fermented Foods and Beverages.Foods (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Low initial metabolite production enhances stability in syntrophic bacterial consortia.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Cooperative traits maintain bacterial niche breadth.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Cooperation and the evolution of bacterial niche breadth.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Bacterial necromass recycling promotes diversity maintenance in bacterial communities via resource partitioning.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Substrate utilization and cross-feeding synergistically determine microbiome resistance to pathogen invasion.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Bacillus populations restore amino acid metabolism in Mesorhizobium under saline-alkali stress to enhance nitrogen fixation efficiency.The ISME journal · 2026Article
- Spatial structure: shaping the ecology and evolution of microbial communities.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2026Review
- Microbial cohorts: bringing ecological meaning to the modularity concept of co-occurrence networks.ISME communications · 2026Article
- Peat promotes production of the edible mushroomFrontiers in microbiology · 2026Article
- Boundary conditions for exploiting the cooperation ofApplied and environmental microbiology · 2025Article
- Metabolic interplay drives population cycles in a cross-feeding microbial community.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Interaction of plant-derived metabolites and rhizobiome functions enhances drought stress tolerance.Genome biology · 2025Article
- The soil-plant-human gut microbiome axis into perspective.Nature communications · 2025Review
- Article
- Bacterial social interactions in syntheticiMeta · 2025Article
7 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Bacteria frequently engage in obligate metabolic mutualisms with other microorganisms. However, it remains generally unclear how the resulting metabolic dependencies affect the ecological niche space accessible to the whole consortium relative to the niche space available to its constituent individuals. Here we address this issue by systematically cultivating metabolically dependent strains of different bacterial species either individually or as pairwise cocultures in a wide range of carbon sources. Our results show that obligate cross-feeding is significantly more likely to expand the metabolic niche space of interacting bacterial populations than to contract it. Moreover, niche expansion occurred predominantly between two specialist taxa and correlated positively with the phylogenetic distance between interaction partners. Together, our results demonstrate that obligate cross-feeding can significantly expand the ecological niche space of interacting bacterial genotypes, thus explaining the widespread occurrence of this type of ecological interaction in natural microbiomes.
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Registered trials
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.