TY - JOUR T1 - Keystone species determine the productivity of synthetic microbial biofilm communities JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/2022.01.23.477386 SP - 2022.01.23.477386 AU - Xinli Sun AU - Jiyu Xie AU - Daoyue Zheng AU - Riyan Xia AU - Wei Wang AU - Weibing Xun AU - Qiwei Huang AU - Ruifu Zhang AU - Ákos T. Kovács AU - Zhihui Xu AU - Qirong Shen Y1 - 2022/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/12/01/2022.01.23.477386.abstract N2 - Microbes typically reside in multi-species communities, whose interactions have considerable impacts on the robustness and functionality of such communities. To manage microbial communities, it is essential to understand the factors driving their assemblage and maintenance. Even though the community composition could be easily assessed, interspecies interactions during community establishment remain poorly understood. Here, we combined co-occurrence network analysis with quantitative PCR to examine the importance of each species within synthetic communities (SynComs) of pellicle biofilms. Genome-scale metabolic models and in vitro experiments indicated that the biomass of SynComs was primarily affected by keystone species that are acting either as metabolic facilitators or as competitors. Our study sets an example of how to construct a model SynCom and investigate interspecies interactions.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. ER -