Adaptation of metabolite leakiness leads to symbiotic chemical exchange and to a resilient microbial ecosystem
Fig 4
Statistics of symbiosis among randomly generated networks.
(A) Dependence of the frequency of coexisting species on the number of chemical components n. Senv = 0.03, Venv = 3. (B) Dependence of the frequency of coexisting species upon Venv. n = 20, Senv = 0.03. (C) Dependence of the frequency of coexisting species upon Senv. n = 20, Venv = 3. (D) The frequency of coexisting species for random fixed diffusion coefficients (with and without leakage of chemicals that confer leak advantage) without cell-level adaptation. n = 20, Senv = 0.03, Venv = 3. In the “random” case, the diffusion coefficients of chemicals nenzyme + 1 ∼ n − 1 are chosen randomly from a uniform distribution [0.0: 1.0] (see also S6 and S7 Figs). In all the panels, the colored bars show the frequency of symbiosis among two to eight species (with different colors), whereas the black bars show noncoexistence. The frequency for each parameter set was calculated from 50 independent samples of N catalytic networks where the species with the fastest growth in isolation has a leak-advantage chemical in its reaction network. In all the numerical simulations, the other parameters are fixed: .