Speaker
Description
Understanding microbial communities is crucial for advancing fields like ecology, biotechnology, and human health. Recently, constraint-based metabolic models of individual organisms have been combined in various ways to study microbial consortia. In this work, we present a comprehensive geometric approach to characterize all feasible microbial interactions. First, we project community models onto the relevant variables for interaction, namely exchange fluxes and community compositions. Next, we compute ’elementary’ compositions/exchange fluxes, thereby extending the concept of minimal metabolic pathways from single species to entire communities. Every feasible community is a combination of these elementary compositions/exchange fluxes, and, surprisingly, every elementary vector represents a fundamental ecological interaction (such as specialization, commensalism, or mutualism). Hence, our geometric approach allows us to decode the metabolic interactions underlying microbial cooperation. Moreover, it provides a foundation for rational community design. Since it treats exchange fluxes and community compositions equally, we can directly apply existing constraint-based methods and algorithms.
