Kinetics-based Inference of Environment-Dependent Microbial Interactions and Their Dynamic Variation

TL;DR: A novel theoretical framework is proposed that allows us to represent interspecies interactions as an explicit function of environmental variables by combining growth kinetics and a generalized Lotka-Volterra model, and is readily applicable to general community ecology to predict interactions among microorganisms such as plants and animals.

Abstract: Microbial communities in nature are dynamically evolving as member species change their interactions subject to environmental variations. Accounting for such context-dependent dynamic variations in interspecies interactions is critical for predictive ecological modeling. However, we lack a fundamental understanding of how microbial interactions are driven by environmental factors due to the absence of generalizable theoretical foundations, significantly limiting our capability to predict and engineer community dynamics and function. To address this issue, we propose a novel theoretical framework that allows us to represent interspecies interactions as an explicit function of environmental variables (such as substrate concentrations) by combining growth kinetics and a generalized Lotka-Volterra model. A synergistic integration of these two complementary models leads to the prediction of alterations in interspecies interactions as the outcome of dynamic balances between positive and negative influences of microbial species in mixed relationships. This unique capability of our approach was experimentally demonstrated using a synthetic consortium of two Escherichia coli mutants that are metabolically dependent (due to an inability to synthesize essential amino acids), but competitively growing on a shared substrate. The analysis of the E. coli binary consortium using our model not only showed how interactions between the two amino acid auxotrophic mutants are controlled by the dynamic shifts in limiting substrates, but also enabled quantifying previously uncharacterizable complex aspects of microbial interactions such as asymmetry in interactions. Our approach can be extended to other related ecological systems to model their environment-dependent interspecies interactions from growth kinetics. IMPORTANCE Modeling of environment-controlled interspecies interactions through separate identification of positive and negative influences of microbes in mixed relationships is a new capability that can significantly improve our ability to understand, predict, and engineer complex dynamics of microbial communities. Moreover, robust prediction of microbial interactions as a function of environmental variables can serve as valuable benchmark data to validate modeling and network inference tools in microbial ecology, the development of which has often been impeded due to the lack of ground truth information on interactions. While demonstrated against microbial data, the theory developed in this work is readily applicable to general community ecology to predict interactions among microorganisms such as plants and animals, as well as microorganisms.