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Updated: Sep 24, 2025

Using Coculture to Detect Chemically Mediated Interspecies Interactions
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Diauxic lags explain unexpected coexistence in multi-resource environments.

Blox Bloxham1, Hyunseok Lee1, Jeff Gore1

  • 1Physics of Living Systems, Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.

Molecular Systems Biology
|May 4, 2022
PubMed
Summary

Microbial species can coexist on multiple resources due to differences in diauxic lags, allowing slower-growing microbes to survive alongside faster ones. This study reveals a tradeoff between growth rate and lag time as a key mechanism for microbial coexistence.

Keywords:
coexistencecommunity assemblydiauxiefitness tradeoffsresource competition

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Area of Science:

  • Microbial ecology
  • Community ecology
  • Evolutionary biology

Background:

  • Species coexistence is a central question in ecology, particularly in microbial communities with diverse resource utilization.
  • In single-resource environments, faster-growing species often exclude slower-growing ones.
  • Understanding factors promoting coexistence in multi-resource environments is crucial for predicting microbial community dynamics.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the role of diauxic lags in enabling microbial coexistence in multi-resource environments.
  • To identify the tradeoff between growth rate and diauxic lag as a mechanism for stable coexistence.
  • To model the impact of this tradeoff on community composition under varying environmental conditions.

Main Methods:

  • Experimental competitions between Acinetobacter species (Aci2) and Pseudomonas aurantiaca (Pa) on single and combined resources (alanine and glutamate).
  • Measurement of growth rates and diauxic lag times for each species.
  • Mathematical modeling to predict community dynamics based on observed tradeoffs.
  • Survey of multiple competition experiments to generalize findings.

Main Results:

  • Acinetobacter species (Aci2) competitively excluded Pseudomonas aurantiaca (Pa) on single resources but they coexisted on a combination of resources.
  • Aci2 exhibited faster growth, while Pa demonstrated shorter diauxic lags.
  • A tradeoff between fast growth and short diauxic lags was identified as the mechanism for coexistence.
  • Coexistence was observed significantly more frequently when the slower-growing species also had shorter diauxic lags.

Conclusions:

  • Differences in diauxic lag times can facilitate stable coexistence between slow-growing and fast-growing microbial species in multi-resource environments.
  • This mechanism, based on resource-dependent growth dynamics and metabolic switching, offers a simple explanation for the emergence of biodiversity in microbial communities.
  • The findings provide a predictive framework for understanding how environmental changes influence microbial community structure.