Adaptation of metabolite leakiness leads to symbiotic chemical exchange and to a resilient microbial ecosystem
Fig 5
Resilience of symbiotic coexistence against the removal of one species.
(A) The upper panel shows the frequency distribution of the number of cell species (0–3) that become extinct when one species is removed. The lower panel shows the ratio of leakage of chemicals from the removed cell species to the total leakage from all cell species to the environment, PLeak,α. Each point corresponds to a sample shown in the upper panel. (B) Average survival ratio (color) against the indices that characterize the diversity of leaking cell species (SCell) and leaked chemical components (SChem). The survival ratio is the number of surviving species after removal of one species, divided by the number of species before the extinction successive to the removal. (If no additional cell species become extinct, this ratio equals one.) The multiple correlation coefficient between survival ratio and (SCell, SChem) is 0.49, while the correlation coefficients between the survival ratio and SCell, between the survival ratio and SChem, and between SCell and SChem are 0.46, 0.43, and 0.65, respectively. For these calculations, we used 55 samples of coexistence of five or six species with n = 20.