Emergent transcriptional adaption facilitates convergent succession within a synthetic community

Taxonomic convergence is common in bacterial communities but its underlying molecular mechanism remains largely unknown. We thus conducted a time-series transcriptional analysis of a convergent two-species synthetic community that grew in a closed broth-culture system. By analyzing the gene expression and monitoring the community structure, we found that gene expression mainly changed in the early stage, whereas community structure significantly changed in the late stage. The significant change of gene expression occurred even at the very beginning, which was designated as “0 h effect”, suggesting the effect of species interaction on gene expression was inevitable. Besides, the effect of interaction on gene expression has a “population effect”, which means that majority species have greater impact on gene expressions of minority species than vice versa. Furthermore, gene set enrichment analysis revealed that among a total of 63 unique pathways (occupying about 50% of all the metabolic pathways in both species), 40 (63%) were consistently suppressed, 16 (25%) were conditionally expressed, and only 7 (11%) were consistently activated. Overall, they were strictly regulated by both time and initial structures. Therefore, we proposed that microorganism responses and the induced gene expression changes play important roles in the process of community succession.