Ecological landscapes guide the assembly of optimal microbial communities
Fig 9
Ruggedness is predictive of search efficacy in models with cross-feeding.
Cross-feeding altered the composition of microbial communities (A), but had no systematic effect on the success of the heuristic search (B) or ruggedness (C). Importantly, the search efficacy and ruggedness remained strongly anti-correlated in communities with cross-feeding (D). Simulated species pools had S = 12 species that leaked a fraction l of the resources they consumed as consumable byproducts. Community function used in panels B, C, D is the abundance of a focal species. A strong negative anti-correlation was found for other choices of community function as well (See S6 Fig). Only one out of 12 modeled resources was supplied externally; the rest were present only due to metabolic leakage. Each species was able to consume 6 resources. Ruggedness was quantified by r/s. See Methods for further simulation details.