Authors: Jamie Alcira Lopez, Bo Liu, Zhiyuan Li, Mohamed S Donia, Ned S Wingreen.
Journal: bioRxiv
DOI: 10.1101/2025.05.16.654511
Link: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12139880/
Published: May, 19, 2025
Document Type: Research Article
Abstract:
Cross-feeding, a phenomenon in which organisms share metabolites, is frequently observed in microbial communities across the natural world. One of the most common forms is waste-product cross-feeding, a unidirectional interaction in which the waste products of one microbe support the growth of another. Despite its ubiquity, it is not well-understood why waste-product cross-feeding persists when a single organism could in principle perform both the producer and consumer role. To address this question, we first analyze cross-feeding evolution in a minimal model of microbial metabolism. The model describes multi-step extraction of energy from a substrate in a simple but thermodynamically correct formulation. Surprisingly, we find that cross-feeding is never evolutionarily stable in this model. By analyzing models with more complex growth functions, we identify a novel mechanism for the evolutionary stability of …