Self-establishing communities enable cooperative metabolite exchange in a eukaryote

• Main Authors: Kate Campbell, Jakob Vowinckel, Michael Mülleder, Silke Malmsheimer, Nicola Lawrence, Enrica Calvani, Leonor Miller-Fleming, Mohammad T Alam, Stefan Christen, Markus A Keller, Markus Ralser
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: eLife Sciences Publications Ltd 2015-10-01
• Series: eLife
• Subjects: metabolism; cooperativity; cellular heterogeneity
• Online Access: https://elifesciences.org/articles/09943

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 upon co-culturing, a situation which implied the absence of growth-relevant metabolite exchange interactions. Contrastingly, we find that yeast colonies maintain a rich exometabolome and that cells prefer the uptake of extracellular metabolites over self-synthesis, indicators of ongoing metabolite exchange. We conceived a system that circumvents co-culturing and begins with a self-supporting cell that grows autonomously into a heterogeneous community, only able to survive by exchanging histidine, leucine, uracil, and methionine. Compensating for the progressive loss of prototrophy, self-establishing communities successfully obtained an auxotrophic composition in a nutrition-dependent manner, maintaining a 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.