Self-establishing communities enable cooperative metabolite exchange in a eukaryote
- University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
- Eidgenoessische Technische Hochschule, Switzerland
Abstract
Metabolite exchange among co-growing cells is frequent by nature, however, is not necessarily occurring at growth-relevant quantities indicative of non-cell-autonomous metabolic function. Complementary auxotrophs of Saccharomyces cerevisiae amino acid and nucleotide metabolism regularly fail to compensate for each other's deficiencies, implying the absence of growth-relevant metabolite exchange capacities. Contrastingly, we find that cells within colonies maintain a rich exometabolome and prefer uptake of extracellular metabolites over self-synthesis, indicators of ongoing metabolite exchange. We conceived a system that begins with a self-supporting cell which grows autonomously into a heterogeneous community, only able to survive by exchanging histidine, leucine, uracil and methionine. Compensating for the progressive loss of prototrophy, resultant communities obtained an auxotrophic composition in a nutrition dependent manner, and achieved wild-type like exometabolome, growth parameters and cell viability. Yeast as a eukaryotic model thus possesses extensive capacity for growth-relevant metabolite exchange, and readily cooperates in metabolism within progressively establishing communities.
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© 2015, Campbell et al.
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Self-establishing communities enable cooperative metabolite exchange in a eukaryote
eLife 4:e09943.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.09943
