TY - JOUR
T1 - Complementary resource preferences spontaneously emerge in diauxic microbial communities
AU - Wang, Zihan
AU - Goyal, Akshit
AU - Dubinkina, Veronika
AU - George, Ashish B.
AU - Wang, Tong
AU - Fridman, Yulia
AU - Maslov, Sergei
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s).
PY - 2021/12
Y1 - 2021/12
N2 - Many microbes grow diauxically, utilizing the available resources one at a time rather than simultaneously. The properties of communities of microbes growing diauxically remain poorly understood, largely due to a lack of theory and models of such communities. Here, we develop and study a minimal model of diauxic microbial communities assembling in a serially diluted culture. We find that unlike co-utilizing communities, diauxic community assembly repeatably and spontaneously leads to communities with complementary resource preferences, namely communities where species prefer different resources as their top choice. Simulations and theory explain that the emergence of complementarity is driven by the disproportionate contribution of the top choice resource to the growth of a diauxic species. Additionally, we develop a geometric approach for analyzing serially diluted communities, with or without diauxie, which intuitively explains several additional emergent community properties, such as the apparent lack of species which grow fastest on a resource other than their most preferred resource. Overall, our work provides testable predictions for the assembly of natural as well as synthetic communities of diauxically shifting microbes.
AB - Many microbes grow diauxically, utilizing the available resources one at a time rather than simultaneously. The properties of communities of microbes growing diauxically remain poorly understood, largely due to a lack of theory and models of such communities. Here, we develop and study a minimal model of diauxic microbial communities assembling in a serially diluted culture. We find that unlike co-utilizing communities, diauxic community assembly repeatably and spontaneously leads to communities with complementary resource preferences, namely communities where species prefer different resources as their top choice. Simulations and theory explain that the emergence of complementarity is driven by the disproportionate contribution of the top choice resource to the growth of a diauxic species. Additionally, we develop a geometric approach for analyzing serially diluted communities, with or without diauxie, which intuitively explains several additional emergent community properties, such as the apparent lack of species which grow fastest on a resource other than their most preferred resource. Overall, our work provides testable predictions for the assembly of natural as well as synthetic communities of diauxically shifting microbes.
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U2 - 10.1038/s41467-021-27023-y
DO - 10.1038/s41467-021-27023-y
M3 - Article
C2 - 34795267
AN - SCOPUS:85119256118
SN - 2041-1723
VL - 12
JO - Nature communications
JF - Nature communications
IS - 1
M1 - 6661
ER -