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This project will develop a stability map for experimentally tractable microbial communities. It will be built around three features: the structure of cross-feeding networks, unequal roles among species, and higher-order effects that appear only when several partners interact.
A central producer, a peripheral consumer, and a species embedded in a feedback loop are unlikely to respond in the same way to partner loss or environmental change. This network context matters because a third species may stabilize an exchange by improving metabolic efficiency or destabilize it by introducing interference, competition, or new dependencies. The project will examine how recovery changes when exchange rates, partner dependencies, and the traits underlying metabolite production and use are allowed to evolve.
Microbial aggregation, budding, dispersal, and related life-cycle processes can help fragile mutualisms persist by keeping complementary partners together. The same processes may lock communities into arrangements that limit future adaptation. The project will identify when loose metabolic exchange begins to behave as an organized ecological unit rather than a temporary set of pairwise interactions.
The outcome will be a map of parameter regions linking simple experimental readouts from triads, perturbation and recovery assays, and short time series to qualitative predictions: robust cross-feeding, fragile but recoverable cross-feeding, or likely collapse.
Recommended Reading
Oña, Leonardo, Samir Giri, Neele Avermann, Maximilian Kreienbaum, Kai M. Thormann, and Christian Kost (2021). “Obligate Cross-Feeding Expands the Metabolic Niche of Bacteria.” Nature Ecology & Evolution 5 (9): 1224–1232. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-021-01505-0.
Oña, Leonardo, and Christian Kost (2022). “Cooperation Increases Robustness to Ecological Disturbance in Microbial Cross-Feeding Networks.” Ecology Letters 25 (6): 1410–1420. https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.14006.
Oña, Leonardo, Shryli K. Shreekar, and Christian Kost (2025). “Disentangling Microbial Interaction Networks.” Trends in Microbiology 33 (6): 619–634. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tim.2025.01.013.
© privat
2026/2027
Leonardo Oña, Dr. rer. nat.
Senior Research Fellow
Universität Osnabrück
from September 2026 to January 2027
Born in 1981 in São Paulo, Brazil
MSc in Biology, University of Córdoba, MSc in Theoretical Physics, Instituto Balseiro, Dr. rer. nat., Theoretical Biology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology/Leipzig University
Fellowship
College for Life Sciences
Arbeitsvorhaben
Stability in Microbial Cross-feeding: Interaction Patterns and Evolving Life Cycle
Microbial communities depend on metabolic exchange. In soils, oceans, biofilms, and animal hosts, metabolites released by one microbe can become essential resources for another. These interactions support ecosystem function and human health. They also raise a broader question: how can local metabolic exchanges generate community-level continuity across disturbance, dispersal, and reassembly?This project will develop a stability map for experimentally tractable microbial communities. It will be built around three features: the structure of cross-feeding networks, unequal roles among species, and higher-order effects that appear only when several partners interact.
A central producer, a peripheral consumer, and a species embedded in a feedback loop are unlikely to respond in the same way to partner loss or environmental change. This network context matters because a third species may stabilize an exchange by improving metabolic efficiency or destabilize it by introducing interference, competition, or new dependencies. The project will examine how recovery changes when exchange rates, partner dependencies, and the traits underlying metabolite production and use are allowed to evolve.
Microbial aggregation, budding, dispersal, and related life-cycle processes can help fragile mutualisms persist by keeping complementary partners together. The same processes may lock communities into arrangements that limit future adaptation. The project will identify when loose metabolic exchange begins to behave as an organized ecological unit rather than a temporary set of pairwise interactions.
The outcome will be a map of parameter regions linking simple experimental readouts from triads, perturbation and recovery assays, and short time series to qualitative predictions: robust cross-feeding, fragile but recoverable cross-feeding, or likely collapse.
Recommended Reading
Oña, Leonardo, Samir Giri, Neele Avermann, Maximilian Kreienbaum, Kai M. Thormann, and Christian Kost (2021). “Obligate Cross-Feeding Expands the Metabolic Niche of Bacteria.” Nature Ecology & Evolution 5 (9): 1224–1232. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-021-01505-0.
Oña, Leonardo, and Christian Kost (2022). “Cooperation Increases Robustness to Ecological Disturbance in Microbial Cross-Feeding Networks.” Ecology Letters 25 (6): 1410–1420. https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.14006.
Oña, Leonardo, Shryli K. Shreekar, and Christian Kost (2025). “Disentangling Microbial Interaction Networks.” Trends in Microbiology 33 (6): 619–634. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tim.2025.01.013.