Speaker
Description
Synthetic microbial consortia offer a controlled setting to study how ecological and evolutionary forces shape community structure. Here we present a mathematical framework for a cross-kingdom autotroph–heterotroph system in which a sucrose-secreting cyanobacterium feeds a heterotrophic community. We model three heterotrophic metabolic strategies- public metabolizing, private metabolizing and cheating and analyse how their metabolic interactions shape coexistence and competition. The framework combines generalized Lotka-Volterra dynamics, Michaelis-Menten kinetics and evolutionary game theory to represent nutrient exchange and frequency-dependent fitness. Laboratory-inspired eco-evolutionary simulations allow strategies to switch between generations, mimicking mutation or phenotypic plasticity. These dynamics reveal parameter regimes and thresholds separating collapse, dominance and coexistence, and show how growth advantages and switching rates drive shifts in community composition and robustness of this cross-kingdom consortium. Together, these results provide design rules for constructing stable synthetic communities under ecological and evolutionary constraints. To make the model accessible and reusable, we deploy it in mxlweb, a browser-based interface for ODE models, where users can vary parameters and initial conditions, run simulations and explore “what-if” scenarios without installing software, enabling rapid exploration and sharing of model-based insights.
