Charting Metabolic Interactions in Microbial Communities

Although metabolic interactions have long been implicated in the assembly of microbial communities, the problem of investigating the resulting complex species networks is still largely open. In this study, we introduce a method for modeling cross-feeding interactions in bacterial communities and evaluate it on over 800 communities from diverse habitats. Our results highlight metabolic dependencies as a major driver of species co-occurrence. The presented methodology is applicable to large datasets and have broad implications for understanding compositional variation in natural communities.