Abstract
Syntrophic interactions based on reciprocal metabolite exchange are widespread in microbial communities, yet the factors determining their stability remain unclear. Using synthetic Escherichia coli consortia composed of lysine and arginine auxotrophs, we show that lower initial metabolite production promotes, rather than limits, syntrophic stability. During serial propagation, replicate cocultures diverged sharply: a minority maintained sustained growth, whereas most became extinct. This divergence was associated with phenotypic differences in metabolite production among founding isolates. Consortia founded by low-producing strains recovered reliably after dilution and were more resistant to invasion by non-producing mutants. By contrast, high-producing founder generated diminishing returns for consortium growth, and increased extracellular metabolite availability that favored exploitation by non-producer. Although we detected no consistent coding-region variations between high- and low-producing isolates, expression differences suggest that outside coding regions may influence these production traits. These results identify constrained initial metabolite production as a key determinant of syntrophic stability.
Acknowledgements
We thank Zhuangdong Bai for discussions on the framework of this work. Sincere thanks also go to all anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and suggestions.
Funding
This research was supported by NSFC-Yunnan United Fund (U2102221), the Innovation Foundation for Doctor Dissertation of Northwestern Polytechnical University (CX2023097; CX2024100), and Natural Science Basic Research Program of Shaanxi (Program No.2025JC-YBQN-245).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary information
Transparent Peer Review file (download PDF )
Supplementary Information: Low initial metabolite production enhances stability in syntrophic bacterial consortia (download PDF )
Reporting Summary (download PDF )
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Reprints and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Ye, N., Dunn, D.W., Yang, Z. et al. Low initial metabolite production enhances stability in syntrophic bacterial consortia.
Commun Biol (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-026-10187-y
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-026-10187-y
Source: Ecology - nature.com
