Spatiotemporal Modeling of Microbial Community Interactions
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Authors
Short, Samantha
Date of Issue
2023-04-28
Type
Presentation
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Abstract
Bacterial communities are essential to plant growth and development; soil microbes can colonize roots and enter into symbiosis with plants, exchanging nutrients and protecting against pathogens. Relatively little is understood about the mechanisms that shape bacterial communities and govern plant-microbe interactions. Environmental conditions, such as plant hosts, soil nutrient conditions, pH, and temperature, influence species' metabolic responses and resulting interspecies interactions as a function of both space and time. Cooperation or competition between bacterial species is likely affected by both their metabolic capabilities and the heterogeneous micro-niches within plant roots. These interactions are very difficult to dissect experimentally, and modeling provides a great tool to develop hypotheses about interactions. This study investigates the utility of the Computation of Microbial Ecosystems in Time and Space (COMETs) software for spatiotemporal metabolic modeling to predict bacterial metabolic and growth responses in simulated environments for seven key bacteria associated with maize roots.