Metabolic modeling of a mutualistic microbial community
The rate of production of methane in many environmentsdepends upon mutualistic interactions between sulfate-reducing bacteriaand methanogens. To enhance our understanding of these relationships, wetook advantage of the fully sequenced genomes of Desulfovibrio vulgarisand Methanococcus maripaludis to produce and analyze the firstmultispecies stoichiometric metabolic model. Model results were comparedto data on growth of the co-culture on lactate in the absence of sulfate.The model accurately predicted several ecologically relevantcharacteristics, including the flux of metabolites and the ratio of D.vulgaris to M. maripaludis cells during growth. In addition, the modeland our data suggested that it was possible to eliminate formate as aninterspecies electron shuttle, but hydrogen transfer was essential forsyntrophic growth. Our work demonstrated that reconstructed metabolicnetworks and stoichiometric models can serve not only to predictmetabolic fluxes and growth phenotypes of single organisms, but also tocapture growth parameters and community composition of simple bacterialcommunities.
- Research Organization:
- COLLABORATION - U.Washington
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Director. Office of Science. Biological andEnvironmental Research
- DOE Contract Number:
- DE-AC02-05CH11231
- OSTI ID:
- 925518
- Report Number(s):
- LBNL-60299; R&D Project: VGTLUW; BnR: KP1501021; TRN: US200809%%781
- Journal Information:
- Molecular Systems Biology, Vol. 3, Issue 92; Related Information: Journal Publication Date: 03/13/2007
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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