TY - JOUR T1 - A Novel Nutritional Predictor Links Microbial Fastidiousness with Lowered Ubiquity, Growth Rate, and Cooperativeness A1 - Zarecki, Raphy A1 - Oberhardt, Matthew A. A1 - Reshef, Leah A1 - Gophna, Uri A1 - Ruppin, Eytan Y1 - 2014/07/17 N2 - Author Summary Understanding microbial nutrition is critical for understanding microbial life, and thus has a major influence in many areas of biology. In recent years, the traditional methods of studying microbial nutrition, which rely on culturing bacteria and assessing their nutritional needs through extensive experiments, have been augmented by the development of genome-scale metabolic models, which enable in-depth analysis and prediction of nutrition for a few well-studied organisms. Recently, a pipeline was developed for generating genome-scale metabolic models automatically (the SEED). Here, we leverage models built from this pipeline in order to develop a novel predictor of microbial minimal medium requirements, which we then apply broadly for thousands of microbes across the tree of life. We first show that nutritional requirements are more similar among microorganisms that co-habit many ecological niches. We then use our medium predictions to examine the fastidiousness of organisms (i.e., their need for complex/specific media), and suggest an explanation for certain observed features of microbial abundance patterns. This study is one of the first to leverage genome-scale models on a large (>1000 species) scale, and sets the potential for a new host of strategies for understanding microbial nutrition and ecology in the future. JF - PLOS Computational Biology JA - PLOS Computational Biology VL - 10 IS - 7 UR - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003726 SP - e1003726 EP - PB - Public Library of Science M3 - doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003726 ER -