Give you an ice cream and a piece of cake. Which one do you eat first? The team of Professor Chao Tang from Peking University found that the bacterial feeding strategy enabled them to optimize their growth. If any strain wants to be willful, eat glucose and lactose, or picky eaters with maltose and malic acid, then the price is a reduction in growth rate and the risk of being eliminated. Combining the topological characteristics of metabolic networks with the optimal allocation of intracellular protein resources, the theoretical model of the research team quantitatively explained the feeding strategies of bacteria against multiple carbon sources.
