Crossfeeding interactions in a minimal marine chitin-degrading community

MCC4, a minimal marine chitin-degrading community with two degraders and two non-degraders, stays stable across ten growth-dilution cycles, enabling reproducible multispecies experiments.

• Why it matters: Mechanistic links between interspecies interactions and polysaccharide degradation in multispecies marine communities remain unclear beyond single isolates or pairwise tests.
• What they did: The authors built MCC4 from globally prevalent taxa and used transcriptomics, metabolomics, and metabolite supplementation assays to map a crossfeeding network.
• The result: One degrader drives chitin breakdown, while the other uses chitin monomers and chitooligomers; non-degraders persist on deacetylated monomers, 2-carbon compounds, nucleotides, and branched-chain amino acids.

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