Diauxic lags explain unexpected coexistence in multi‐resource environments
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44320_2022_Article_BFMSB202110630.pdf
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Author(s)
Bloxham, Blox
Lee, Hyunseok
Gore, Jeff
Date Issued
May 4, 2022
Journal
Molecular Systems Biology
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group UK
Citation
Molecular Systems Biology. 2022 May 04;18(5):MSB202110630
Version
Final published version
Abstract
How the coexistence of species is affected by the presence of multiple resources is a major question in microbial ecology. We experimentally demonstrate that differences in diauxic lags, which occur as species deplete their own environments and adapt their metabolisms, allow slow‐growing microbes to stably coexist with faster‐growing species in multi‐resource environments despite being excluded in single‐resource environments. In our focal example, an Acinetobacter species (Aci2) competitively excludes Pseudomonas aurantiaca (Pa) on alanine and on glutamate. However, they coexist on the combination of both resources. Experiments reveal that Aci2 grows faster but Pa has shorter diauxic lags. We establish a tradeoff between Aci2’s fast growth and Pa’s short lags as their mechanism for coexistence. We model this tradeoff to accurately predict how environmental changes affect community composition. We extend our work by surveying a large set of competitions and observe coexistence nearly four times as frequently when the slow‐grower is the fast‐switcher. Our work illustrates a simple mechanism, based entirely on supplied‐resource growth dynamics, for the emergence of multi‐resource coexistence.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
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Creative Commons Attribution
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.15252/msb.202110630
