How microbial communities "exchange knowledge"

This process allows the microbiome to keep itself and its environment healthy, and can help scientists create powerful, customized microbial systems that range from cleaning up toxins in the environment to producing biofuels and other consumer goods

The study was published On September 1 at Nature Chemical Biology

Large, complex microbial communities live all over the world, from rivers and mountains to humans and houses

No matter how different these microbes may appear on the surface, if they live in similar environments, they are likely to assume the same function

Professor you of biomedical engineering at Duke University said: "If you count the number of copies of genes encoding certain functions, their numbers can remain stable even if the species composition of the community changes

Horizontal gene transfer is the process

In the new paper, You and his colleagues show that this gene transfer plays a vital role

The team then constructed a community of up to 72 bacteria while exchanging up to 13 different genes and measuring the stability

"These results have been speculated before, but have never been quantified in living communities," You said

In other words, if the plumber on site also knows how to route the building, the construction worker will be very flexible

In the future, you want to study natural microbial communities to definitively demonstrate that this phenomenon is important

"In some cases, complex metabolic pathways are difficult to design in a single bacterial species, and different populations are more likely to perform different steps of the process," You said

Horizontal Gene Transfer Enables Programmable Gene Stability in Synthetic Microbiota