相关论文: Microbial metabolism: optimal control of uptake ve…

Microbes produce metabolic resources that are important for cell growth yet leak across membranes into the extracellular environment. Other microbes in the same environment can use these resources and adjust their own metabolic production…

A fundamental goal of microbial ecology is to understand what determines the diversity, stability, and structure of microbial ecosystems. The microbial context poses special conceptual challenges because of the strong mutual influences…

The metabolic activity of microbes has played an essential role in the evolution and persistence of life on Earth. Microbial metabolism plays a primary role in the flow of carbon, nitrogen and other elements through the biosphere on a…

Microbial communities display extreme diversity. A variety of strains or species coexist even when limited by a single resource. It has been argued that metabolite secretion creates new niches and facilitates such diversity. Nonetheless, it…

Protein synthesis is an important determinant of microbial growth and response that demands a high amount of metabolic and biosynthetic resources. Despite these costs, microbial species from different taxa and habitats massively synthesize…

Despite major environmental and genetic differences, microbial metabolic networks are known to generate consistent physiological outcomes across vastly different organisms. This remarkable robustness suggests that, at least in bacteria,…

The dynamics of microbial communities is incredibly complex, determined by competition for metabolic substrates and cross-feeding of byproducts. Species in the community grow by harvesting energy from chemical reactions that transform…

In order to grow in any given environment, bacteria need to collect information about the medium composition and implement suitable growth strategies by adjusting their regulatory and metabolic degrees of freedom. In the standard sense,…

Microbial communities are ubiquitous in nature and come in a multitude of forms, ranging from communities dominated by a handful of species to communities containing a wide variety of metabolically distinct organisms. This huge range in…

Microbial communities routinely have several possible species compositions or community states observed for the same environmental parameters. Changes in these parameters can trigger abrupt and persistent transitions (regime shifts) between…

The energy dissipated by a living organism is commonly identified with heat generation. However, as cells exchange metabolites with their environment they also dissipate energy in the form of chemical entropy. How dissipation is distributed…

Microbial populations exhibit a broad spectrum of nutrient utilization strategies, ranging from strategies utilizing diverse nutrients, called "generalists," to those being highly adapted to specific nutrients, called "specialists." The…

High-throughput experimental techniques and bioinformatics tools make it possible to obtain reconstructions of the metabolism of microbial species. Combined with mathematical frameworks such as flux balance analysis, which assumes that…

Recent work suggests that cross-feeding -- the secretion and consumption of metabolic biproducts by microbes -- is essential for understanding microbial ecology. Yet how cross-feeding and competition combine to give rise to ecosystem-level…

Metabolism and evolution are closely connected: if a mutation incurs extra energetic costs for an organism, there is a baseline selective disadvantage that may or may not be compensated for by other adaptive effects. A long-standing, but to…

During overflow metabolism, cells excrete glycolytic byproducts when growing under aerobic conditions in a seemingly wasteful fashion. While potentially advantageous for microbes with finite oxidative capacity, its role in higher organisms…

Mutations in a microbial population can increase the frequency of a genotype not only by increasing its exponential growth rate, but also by decreasing its lag time or adjusting the yield (resource efficiency). The contribution of multiple…

A classic problem in microbiology is that bacteria display two types of growth behavior when cultured on a mixture of two carbon sources: the two sources are sequentially consumed one after another (diauxie) or they are simultaneously…

Microbes providing public goods are widespread in nature despite running the risk of being exploited by free-riders. However, the precise ecological factors supporting cooperation are still puzzling. Following recent experiments, we…

The human gut microbiome is a complex ecosystem, in which hundreds of microbial species and metabolites coexist, in part due to an extensive network of cross-feeding interactions. However, both the large-scale trophic organization of this…