Speaker
Description
Systematically mapping species interactions in microbial communities remains a central challenge. Community-level elementary flux modes (cEFMs) provide a complete description of community metabolism, but are intractable at genome-scale, necessitating optimization-based approaches. However, the latter introduce thermodynamically infeasible cycles (TICs) across organisms, leading to spurious cross-feeding predictions.
Here, we show that blocking external metabolite inflow allows cEFMs to fully characterize all TICs in a community model. We leverage this insight to derive simple activity-based constraints that yield cycle-free solutions at genome-scale, when integrated into a mixed-integer linear program.
The resulting computational framework links metabolic function, species interactions, and thermodynamic feasibility for the analysis and design of microbial consortia.
