Literature covered: early 2000s to late 2017Bacteria frequently exchange metabolites with other micro- and macro-organisms. In these often obligate cross-feeding interactions, primary metabolites such as vitamins, amino acids, nucleotides, or growth factors are exchanged. The widespread distribution of this type of metabolic interactions, however, is at odds with evolutionary theory: why should an organism invest costly resources to benefit other individuals rather than using these metabolites to maximize its own fitness? Recent empirical work has shown that bacterial genotypes can significantly benefit from trading metabolites with other bacteria relative to cells not engaging in such interactions. Here, we will provide a comprehensive overview over the ecological factors and evolutionary mechanisms that have been identified to explain the evolution and maintenance of metabolic mutualisms among microorganisms. Furthermore, we will highlight general principles that underlie the adaptive evolution of interconnected microbial metabolic networks as well as the evolutionary consequences that result for cells living in such communities.

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Bacteria frequently lose biosynthetic genes, thus making them dependent on an environmental uptake of the corresponding metabolite. Despite the ubiquity of this ‘genome streamlining’, it is generally unclear whether the concomitant loss of biosynthetic functions is favored by natural selection or rather caused by random genetic drift. Here we demonstrate experimentally that a loss of metabolic functions is strongly selected for when the corresponding metabolites can be derived from the environment. Serially propagating replicate populations of the bacterium Escherichia coli in amino acid-containing environments revealed that auxotrophic genotypes rapidly evolved in less than 2,000 generations in almost all replicate populations. Moreover, auxotrophs also evolved in environments lacking amino acids–yet to a much lesser extent. Loss of these biosynthetic functions was due to mutations in both structural and regulatory genes. In competition experiments performed in the presence of amino acids, auxotrophic mutants gained a significant fitness advantage over the evolutionary ancestor, suggesting their emergence was selectively favored. Interestingly, auxotrophic mutants derived amino acids not only via an environmental uptake, but also by cross-feeding from coexisting strains. Our results show that adaptive fitness benefits can favor biosynthetic loss-of-function mutants and drive the establishment of intricate metabolic interactions within microbial communities.

In bacterial communities, cells often communicate by the release and detection of small diffusible molecules, a process termed quorum-sensing. Signal molecules are thought to broadly diffuse in space; however, they often regulate traits such as conjugative transfer that strictly depend on the local community composition. This raises the question how nearby cells within the community can be detected. Here, we compare the range of communication of different quorum-sensing systems. While some systems support long-range communication, we show that others support a form of highly localized communication. In these systems, signal molecules propagate no more than a few microns away from signaling cells, due to the irreversible uptake of the signal molecules from the environment. This enables cells to accurately detect micron scale changes in the community composition. Several mobile genetic elements, including conjugative elements and phages, employ short-range communication to assess the fraction of susceptible host cells in their vicinity and adaptively trigger horizontal gene transfer in response. Our results underscore the complex spatial biology of bacteria, which can communicate and interact at widely different spatial scales.

Microbial populations often experience fluctuations in nutrient complexity in their natural environment such as between high molecular weight polysaccharides and simple monosaccharides. However, it is unclear if cells can adopt growth behaviors that allow individuals to optimally respond to differences in nutrient complexity. Here, we directly control nutrient complexity and use quantitative single-cell analysis to study the growth dynamics of individuals within populations of the aquatic bacterium Caulobacter crescentus. We show that cells form clonal microcolonies when growing on the polysaccharide xylan, which is abundant in nature and degraded using extracellular cell-linked enzymes; and disperse to solitary growth modes when the corresponding monosaccharide xylose becomes available or nutrients are exhausted. We find that the cellular density required to achieve maximal growth rates is four-fold higher on xylan than on xylose, indicating that aggregating is advantageous on polysaccharides. When collectives on xylan are transitioned to xylose, cells start dispersing, indicating that colony formation is no longer beneficial and solitary behaviors might serve to reduce intercellular competition. Our study demonstrates that cells can dynamically tune their behaviors when nutrient complexity fluctuates, elucidates the quantitative advantages of distinct growth behaviors for individual cells and indicates why collective growth modes are prevalent in microbial populations.

Metabolism is essential to organismal life, because it provides energy and building block metabolites. Even though it is known that the biosynthesis of metabolites consumes a significant proportion of the resources available to a cell, the factors that determine their production costs remain less well understood. In this context, it is especially unclear how the nutritional environment affects the costs of metabolite production. Here, we use the amino acid metabolism of Escherichia coli as a model to show that the point at which a carbon source enters central metabolic pathways is a major determinant of individual metabolite production costs. Growth rates of auxotrophic genotypes, which in the presence of the required amino acid save biosynthetic costs, were compared to the growth rates that prototrophic cells achieved under the same conditions. The experimental results showed a strong concordance with computationally estimated biosynthetic costs, which allowed us, for the first time, to systematically quantify carbon source-dependent metabolite production costs. Thus, we demonstrate that the nutritional environment in combination with network architecture is an important but hitherto underestimated factor influencing biosynthetic costs and thus microbial growth. Our observations are highly relevant for the optimization of biotechnological processes as well as for understanding the ecology of microorganisms in their natural environments.

Many bacterial lineages lack seemingly essential metabolic genes. Previous work suggested selective benefits could drive the loss of biosynthetic functions from bacterial genomes when the corresponding metabolites are sufficiently available in the environment. However, the factors that govern this "genome streamlining" remain poorly understood. Here we determine the effect of plasticity and epistasis on the fitness of Escherichia coli genotypes from whose genome biosynthetic genes for one, two, or three different amino acids have been deleted. Competitive fitness experiments between auxotrophic mutants and prototrophic wild-type cells in one of two carbon environments revealed that plasticity and epistasis strongly affected the mutants' fitness individually and interactively. Positive and negative epistatic interactions were prevalent, yet on average cancelled each other out. Moreover, epistasis correlated negatively with the expected effects of combined auxotrophy-causing mutations, thus producing a pattern of diminishing returns. Moreover, computationally analyzing 1,432 eubacterial metabolic networks revealed that most pairs of auxotrophies co-occurred significantly more often than expected by chance, suggesting epistatic interactions and/or environmental factors favored these combinations. Our results demonstrate that both the genetic background and environmental conditions determine the adaptive value of a loss-of-biochemical-function mutation and that fitness gains decelerate, as more biochemical functions are lost.

Polysaccharide breakdown by bacteria requires the activity of enzymes that degrade polymers either intra- or extra-cellularly. The latter mechanism generates a localized pool of breakdown products that are accessible to the enzyme producers themselves as well as to other organisms. Marine bacterial taxa often show marked differences in the production and secretion of degradative enzymes that break down polysaccharides. These differences can have profound effects on the pool of diffusible breakdown products and hence on the ecological dynamics. However, the consequences of differences in enzymatic secretions on cellular growth dynamics and interactions are unclear. Here we study growth dynamics of single cells within populations of marine Vibrionaceae strains that grow on the abundant marine polymer alginate, using microfluidics coupled to quantitative single-cell analysis and mathematical modelling. We find that strains that have low extracellular secretions of alginate lyases aggregate more strongly than strains that secrete high levels of enzymes. One plausible reason for this observation is that low secretors require a higher cellular density to achieve maximal growth rates in comparison with high secretors. Our findings indicate that increased aggregation increases intercellular synergy amongst cells of low-secreting strains. By mathematically modelling the impact of the level of degradative enzyme secretion on the rate of diffusive oligomer loss, we find that enzymatic secretion capability modulates the propensity of cells within clonal populations to cooperate or compete with each other. Our experiments and models demonstrate that enzymatic secretion capabilities can be linked with the propensity of cell aggregation in marine bacteria that extracellularly catabolize polysaccharides.