Dataset for: Short-range interactions govern the dynamics and functions of microbial communities

Our experiments and models demonstrate that the spatial scale of cell-to-cell interaction plays a fundamental role in understanding and controlling natural communities, and in engineering microbial systems for specific purposes. ignificance Statement Communities of interacting microbes perform fundamental processes on earth. We do not understand well how these processes emerge from the interactions between individual microbial cells.

Our work investigates how strongly individual cells interact and how the strength of the interaction depends on the distance between cells. The discovery that individual cells ‘live in a small world’, i.e. they only interact with a small number of cells around them, changes our understanding of how cells in natural microbial communities are metabolically coupled and how their spatial arrangement determines emergent properties at the community level.

Our quantitative single-cell approach allows to address central questions on systems composed of interacting genotypes and to increase our understanding and ability to control microbial communities.