ArticleNature communications2024
Cooperative growth in microbial communities is a driver of multistability.
Article in Nature communications, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Coexistence Theory for Microbial Ecology, and Vice Versa.Environmental microbiology · 2025Pooled it
- Cross-feeding enables robust coexistence between four bacterial species.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Towards Key Principles of Host-Associated Microbiome Assembly.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Stochastic Forces in Microbial Community Assembly: Founding Community Size Governs Divergent Ecological Trajectories.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Keystone concept revisited: insights into microbial community dynamics and control.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2026Review
- The network structure of cross-feeding impacts microbial community diversity under growth-inhibiting stresses.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Emergent frequency-dependent selection predicts mutation outcomes in complex ecological communities.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Water flow shapes the niche differentiation of complete ammonia oxidizers in sediments.Archives of microbiology · 2026Article
- Environmental complexity shapes maintenance of bacterial diversity through context-dependent interactions among niche axes.The ISME journal · 2026Article
- Metabolic blueprints of monocultures enable prediction and design of synthetic microbial consortia.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Spatial structure: shaping the ecology and evolution of microbial communities.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2026Review
- Antibiotics and priority effects on colonizing resistant Escherichia coli strain assemblages in a community setting.PloS one · 2026Article
- Experimental evolution in an era of molecular manipulation.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2026Review
- Linking spatial drug heterogeneity to microbial growth dynamics in theory and experiment.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Decoding the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of bacterial virulence gene expression using single-cell approaches.Frontiers in microbiology · 2026Review
- Evaluating Metabolic Support in Pairwise Microbial Communities Using MetQuest.Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2026Article
- Emergence of alternative states in a synthetic human gut microbial community.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Article
- Host-independent synergism between Lactobacillus crispatus and other vaginal lactobacilli.Cell reports · 2025Article
- Quantification and Determination of Compatible Bacterial Consortia.Microbial biotechnology · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Microbial communities often exhibit more than one possible stable composition for the same set of external conditions. In the human microbiome, these persistent changes in species composition and abundance are associated with health and disease states, but the drivers of these alternative stable states remain unclear. Here we experimentally demonstrate that a cross-kingdom community, composed of six species relevant to the respiratory tract, displays four alternative stable states each dominated by a different species. In pairwise coculture, we observe widespread bistability among species pairs, providing a natural origin for the multistability of the full community. In contrast with the common association between bistability and antagonism, experiments reveal many positive interactions within and between community members. We find that multiple species display cooperative growth, and modeling predicts that this could drive the observed multistability within the community as well as non-canonical pairwise outcomes. A biochemical screening reveals that glutamate either reduces or eliminates cooperativity in the growth of several species, and we confirm that such supplementation reduces the extent of bistability across pairs and reduces multistability in the full community. Our findings provide a mechanistic explanation of how cooperative growth rather than competitive interactions can underlie multistability in microbial communities.
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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.