Pulsed, continuous or somewhere in between? Resource dynamics matter in the optimisation of microbial communities

Area of Science:

• Microbial ecology
• Systems biology
• Synthetic biology

Background:

• Optimizing microbial communities holds potential for medicine, agriculture, and industry.
• Resource supply dynamics are critical for microbial community assembly but are inconsistently studied.
• Discrepancies exist between theoretical (continuous supply) and experimental (pulsed supply) approaches.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how microbial community composition varies under continuous versus pulsed resource supply.
• To highlight the impact of resource supply regimes on microbial community assembly.
• To inform the optimization of synthetic and natural microbial communities.

Main Methods:

• Simulations using classical resource competition models.
• Comparison of community composition under continuous resource supply versus pulsed resource supply.
• Analysis of divergence in community structure based on pulsing intervals.

Main Results:

• Community composition rapidly diverges between continuous and pulsed resource supply regimes.
• Almost zero overlap in community composition occurs when pulsing intervals exceed four hours.
• Resource supply regime significantly impacts microbial community assembly.

Conclusions:

• Resource supply dynamics are a critical constraint and tuning mechanism for microbial community design and optimization.
• The resource supply regime must be specifically tailored to the microbial community being optimized.
• Future research and applications must account for resource supply dynamics for effective microbial community engineering.