MIMEco: multi-objective metabolic modeling to predict and explain pairwise interactions.

MIMEco accurately predicts pairwise microbial interactions and metabolite exchanges without requiring abundance data, validated by replicating experimental co-culture results of two Escherichia coli strains.

• Why it matters: Understanding microbial interactions is essential for ecosystem dynamics but is limited by costly experiments and complex bioinformatics tools, hindering broader analysis and application.
• What they did: The study introduces MIMEco, an open-source Python package that uses multi-objective optimization and Pareto fronts to predict interaction types, strengths, and exchanged metabolites from mechanistic models.
• The result: MIMEco reliably replicates experimental results, making metabolic interaction modeling accessible for non-specialists and advancing microbial ecology research in biomedical and environmental contexts.