Microbiology: Taking the bad with the good

Modelling of the interactions between antibiotic production and antibiotic degradation reveals that these opposing activities are key to maintaining diversity in microbial communities. See Letter p.516 Understanding how stability in multispecies communities is maintained in the face of negative interactions via antibiotic production is a key goal in microbial ecology. Most ecological models for antibiotic interactions assume pairwise relationships between species that result in rock–scissor–paper type cycling and spatial separation. This doesn't reflect the in situ observations though, where communities are far more intermixed. Instead, Eric Kelsic and colleagues propose a three-species interaction assay, in which one species is capable of antibiotic degradation. Using a mixture of modelling and experimental validation, the authors show that including antibiotic degraders allows the system to robustly move towards an intermixed stable state.

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