Metabolic Resource Allocation in Individual Microbes Determines Ecosystem Interactions and Spatial Dynamics

The interspecies exchange of metabolites plays a key role in the spatiotemporal dynamics of microbial communities. This raises the question of whether ecosystem-level behavior of structured communities can be predicted using genome-scale metabolic models for multiple organisms. We developed a modeling framework that integrates dynamic flux balance analysis with diffusion on a lattice and applied it to engineered communities. First, we predicted and experimentally confirmed the species ratio to which a two-species mutualistic consortium converges and the equilibrium composition of a newly engineered three-member community. We next identified a specific spatial arrangement of colonies, which gives rise to what…