RevieweLife2022
Noisy metabolism can promote microbial cross-feeding.
Review in eLife, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed, 39 citations in OpenAlex.
- Environmental formermSystems · 2026Article
- The network structure of cross-feeding impacts microbial community diversity under growth-inhibiting stresses.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Limits to the evolution of metabolic dependency in spatially structured microbial communities.iScience · 2026Article
- Phosphite as an engineered niche formSystems · 2025Article
- Strengthen or Weaken: Evolutionary Directions of Cross-Feeding After Formation.Environmental microbiology reports · 2025Review
- Critical assessment of quenching and extraction/sample preparation methods for microorganisms in metabolomics.Metabolomics : Official journal of the Metabolomic Society · 2025Review
- Mechanisms promoting biodiversity in ecosystems.Quantitative biology (Beijing, China) · 2025Review
- Fitness and adaptive evolution of a Rhodococcus sp. harboring dioxin-catabolic plasmids.World journal of microbiology & biotechnology · 2025Article
- Metabolic reprogramming in PGPR reveals cross-feeding-driven physiological shifts and metabolic adaptations.Frontiers in microbiology · 2025Article
- Base editor-mediated large-scale screening of functional mutations in bacteria for industrial phenotypes.Science China. Life sciences · 2024Article
- Niche availability and competitive loss by facilitation control proliferation of bacterial strains intended for soil microbiome interventions.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Citrate cross-feeding bymBio · 2024Article
- Ecological dependencies and the illusion of cooperation in microbial communities.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2024Article
- Searching for Principles of Microbial Ecology Across Levels of Biological Organization.Integrative and comparative biology · 2023Article
- Resource competition can explain simplicity in microbial community assembly.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Antibiotic resistance in bacterial communities.Current opinion in microbiology · 2023Review
- Cross-feeding in the gut microbiome: Ecology and mechanisms.Cell host & microbe · 2023Review
- Breakdown of clonal cooperative architecture in multispecies biofilms and the spatial ecology of predation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Cross-feeding, the exchange of nutrients between organisms, is ubiquitous in microbial communities. Despite its importance in natural and engineered microbial systems, our understanding of how inter-species cross-feeding arises is incomplete, with existing theories limited to specific scenarios. Here, we introduce a novel theory for the emergence of such cross-feeding, which we term noise-averaging cooperation (NAC). NAC is based on the idea that, due to their small size, bacteria are prone to noisy regulation of metabolism which limits their growth rate. To compensate, related bacteria can share metabolites with each other to 'average out' noise and improve their collective growth. According to the Black Queen Hypothesis, this metabolite sharing among kin, a form of 'leakage', then allows for the evolution of metabolic interdependencies among species including de novo speciation via gene deletions. We first characterize NAC in a simple ecological model of cell metabolism, showing that metabolite leakage can in principle substantially increase growth rate in a community context. Next, we develop a generalized framework for estimating the potential benefits of NAC among real bacteria. Using single-cell protein abundance data, we predict that bacteria suffer from substantial noise-driven growth inefficiencies, and may therefore benefit from NAC. We then discuss potential evolutionary pathways for the emergence of NAC. Finally, we review existing evidence for NAC and outline potential experimental approaches to detect NAC in microbial communities.
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What OpenQuestion holds
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.