TY - JOUR
T1 - Microbial consortia at steady supply
AU - Taillefumier, Thibaud
AU - Posfai, Anna
AU - Meir, Yigal
AU - Wingreen, Ned S.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the DARPA Biochronicity program under Grant D12AP00025, by theNational Institutes of Health under Grant R01 GM082938, and by the National Science Foundation under Grant NSF PHY11-25915. We thank Bonnie Bassler, William Bialek, Curt Callan, and Simon Levin for many insightful discussions.
Publisher Copyright:
© Taillefumier et al.
PY - 2017/5/5
Y1 - 2017/5/5
N2 - Metagenomics has revealed hundreds of species in almost all microbiota. In a few well-studied cases, microbial communities have been observed to coordinate their metabolic fluxes. In principle, microbes can divide tasks to reap the benefits of specialization, as in human economies. However, the benefits and stability of an economy of microbial specialists are far from obvious. Here, we physically model the population dynamics of microbes that compete for steadily supplied resources. Importantly, we explicitly model the metabolic fluxes yielding cellular biomass production under the constraint of a limited enzyme budget. We find that population dynamics generally leads to the coexistence of different metabolic types. We establish that these microbial consortia act as cartels, whereby population dynamics pins down resource concentrations at values for which no other strategy can invade. Finally, we propose that at steady supply, cartels of competing strategies automatically yield maximum biomass, thereby achieving a collective optimum.
AB - Metagenomics has revealed hundreds of species in almost all microbiota. In a few well-studied cases, microbial communities have been observed to coordinate their metabolic fluxes. In principle, microbes can divide tasks to reap the benefits of specialization, as in human economies. However, the benefits and stability of an economy of microbial specialists are far from obvious. Here, we physically model the population dynamics of microbes that compete for steadily supplied resources. Importantly, we explicitly model the metabolic fluxes yielding cellular biomass production under the constraint of a limited enzyme budget. We find that population dynamics generally leads to the coexistence of different metabolic types. We establish that these microbial consortia act as cartels, whereby population dynamics pins down resource concentrations at values for which no other strategy can invade. Finally, we propose that at steady supply, cartels of competing strategies automatically yield maximum biomass, thereby achieving a collective optimum.
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U2 - 10.7554/eLife.22644
DO - 10.7554/eLife.22644
M3 - Article
C2 - 28473032
AN - SCOPUS:85019637560
SN - 2050-084X
VL - 6
JO - eLife
JF - eLife
M1 - e22644
ER -