Vila Jean C C, Goldford Joshua, Estrela Sylvie, Bajic Djordje, Sanchez-Gorostiaga Alicia, Damian-Serrano Alejandro, Lu Nanxi, Marsland Robert, Rebolleda-Gomez Maria, Mehta Pankaj, Sanchez Alvaro
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University, New Haven, CT USA.
Microbial Sciences Institute, Yale University, West Haven, CT, USA.
bioRxiv. 2023 Oct 28:2023.10.25.564019. doi: 10.1101/2023.10.25.564019.
When microbial communities form, their composition is shaped by selective pressures imposed by the environment. Can we predict which communities will assemble under different environmental conditions? Here, we hypothesize that quantitative similarities in metabolic traits across metabolically similar environments lead to predictable similarities in community composition. To that end, we measured the growth rate and by-product profile of a library of proteobacterial strains in a large number of single nutrient environments. We found that growth rates and secretion profiles were positively correlated across environments when the supplied substrate was metabolically similar. By analyzing hundreds of in-vitro communities experimentally assembled in an array of different synthetic environments, we then show that metabolically similar substrates select for taxonomically similar communities. These findings lead us to propose and then validate a comparative approach for quantitatively predicting the effects of novel substrates on the composition of complex microbial consortia.
当微生物群落形成时，其组成受到环境施加的选择压力的影响。我们能否预测在不同环境条件下会形成哪些群落？在这里，我们假设代谢相似的环境中代谢特征的定量相似性会导致群落组成具有可预测的相似性。为此，我们测量了大量单一营养环境中变形菌菌株文库的生长速率和副产物谱。我们发现，当供应的底物在代谢上相似时，不同环境中的生长速率和分泌谱呈正相关。通过分析在一系列不同合成环境中实验组装的数百个体外群落，我们进而表明代谢相似的底物会选择分类学上相似的群落。这些发现促使我们提出并验证一种比较方法，用于定量预测新型底物对复杂微生物群落组成的影响。
