Fig. 5: Evolutionary trajectories towards community attractors.
a PCA of gene frequencies of 59 metabolic genes in 58 communities over the whole duration of the experiment. One dot represents one community. For clarity, only the initial community and final time point of the simulations are shown. This separates communities by strategy along the first component, and reveals that topology of the evolved metabolic network determines metabolic strategy of the community: networks with reactions that degrade resource R for energy cross-feed on building blocks, whereas networks with reactions that degrade building block B1 or B2 for energy remain metabolically autonomous and consume all building blocks from the environment. b–d Evolutionary trajectory showing all time points in the PCA for a community that b evolves cross-feeding (community 9), c metabolic autonomy (community 4) and d switches between strategies (community 18). For visualisation purposes outlier populations 59 and 47 were omitted from this analysis (see Supplementary Fig. 5 for analysis including these outliers).
