Ponente
Descripción
Microbial interactions are commonly represented as fixed ecological categories such as competition, mutualism, commensalism, or neutrality. However, growing evidence suggests that these interaction regimes are context-dependent and may reorganize dynamically in response to environmental conditions, metabolic constraints, and physiological variability. We introduce the Strategic Metabolic Interaction Model (SMIM), a novel eco–metabolic framework designed to describe ecological interactions as emergent properties arising from adaptive resource allocation and metabolite exchange.
SMIM integrates genome-scale metabolic models (GSMMs), dynamic optimization, extracellular resource dynamics, latent interaction variables, and continuous physiological heterogeneity within a unified mathematical framework. Rather than imposing interaction types a priori, the model represents ecological relationships as state-dependent outcomes of intracellular metabolic optimization operating under fluctuating environmental conditions.
The framework explicitly incorporates cross-feeding, resource competition, and cooperative metabolite exchange, allowing interaction regimes to emerge and transition over time. Simulations inspired by hypersaline microbial systems reproduce nonlinear interaction reversals, transient cooperation, and dynamic shifts between competitive and facilitative states. These behaviors arise naturally from metabolic adaptation and environmental feedback, without requiring predefined ecological assumptions.
Beyond prediction, SMIM provides an inferential perspective in which ecological interactions become quantifiable latent variables that can be estimated and analyzed statistically. The framework suggests that microbial community organization is an emergent consequence of constrained metabolic adaptation under physiological heterogeneity, environmental feedback, and partial observability. SMIM therefore offers a mechanistic bridge between systems biology, microbial ecology, and ecological theory.