Fig. 4

Predicted metabolic products and food web of an anaerobic microbial community. The metabolism of a community consisting of 19 bacterial species commonly found in the human gut and one archaeon (Methanosarcina barkeri) was predicted using BacArena [52]. Growth curves show the sum of organisms in the shared environment over the simulation time. The heatmaps display the predicted metabolite production (red) and consumption (blue) during exponential growth before the inflection point. Production and consumption rates at all time steps are shown in Additional file 1, Fig. S5. All bacterial models were reconstructed by CarveMe, gapseq, or ModelSEED, with the exception of M. barkeri for which a published and manually curated model [117] was used