Seminars & Events

Computing, Environment and Life Sciences Mathematics and Computer Science Division
"Towards revealing the design principles of bacterial communities"

DATE: January 27, 2011 to January 27, 2011
TIME: 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
SPEAKER: Raphael Zarecki, PhD Student, Tel Aviv University
LOCATION: TCS Building 240, Room 4301, Argonne National Laboratory
HOST: Chris Henry

Description:
Abstract
Revealing the ecological principles that shape natural communities is a major challenge of the post-genomic era. The recent publication of 118 metabolic models of bacterial species across the tree of life allows inferring and analyzing the whole set of 6903 pairwise competitive and cooperative interactions predicted to occur between these species. By crossing computational predictions with ecological data derived from 2801 different natural samples we conduct the first systematic study of the interactions between ecologically co-occurring, randomly-distributed, and mutually-exclusive pairs of species. We find that the level of competition between two species, their prospects to be involved in cooperative interactions and the similarity of their positioning in the communal-network of interactions are associated with their prospects to co-exist in nature. In support of the (controversial) role of competition in community assembly, we show that niche-exclusion and competition are associated features. Most predicted cooperative interactions are asymmetrical give-and-take relations, corresponding to the documented prevalence of syntrophic interactions within bacterial consortia. They are found to form significantly many close cooperative multi-species cycles between community members, indicating that they are beneficial at the community level. Finally, experiments inducing co-growth shifts in co-culture testify that our computational framework can be used for the design of synthetic consortia optimized towards a given application, including biodegradation and probiotics.

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