A multidimensional perspective on microbial interactions
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Published version
Date
2019-06-01
Authors
Pacheco, Alan R.
Segrè, Daniel
Version
Published version
OA Version
Citation
Alan R Pacheco, Daniel Segrè. 2019. "A multidimensional perspective on microbial interactions.." FEMS Microbiol Lett, Volume 366, Issue 11, https://doi.org/10.1093/femsle/fnz125
Abstract
Beyond being simply positive or negative, beneficial or inhibitory, microbial interactions can involve a diverse set of mechanisms, dependencies and dynamical properties. These more nuanced features have been described in great detail for some specific types of interactions, (e.g. pairwise metabolic cross-feeding, quorum sensing or antibiotic killing), often with the use of quantitative measurements and insight derived from modeling. With a growing understanding of the composition and dynamics of complex microbial communities for human health and other applications, we face the challenge of integrating information about these different interactions into comprehensive quantitative frameworks. Here, we review the literature on a wide set of microbial interactions, and explore the potential value of a formal categorization based on multidimensional vectors of attributes. We propose that such an encoding can facilitate systematic, direct comparisons of interaction mechanisms and dependencies, and we discuss the relevance of an atlas of interactions for future modeling and rational design efforts.
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Copyright FEMS 2019. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.