MICROBIOLOGY Correction for “Metabolic dependencies drive species co-occurrence in diverse microbial communities,” by Aleksej Zelezniak, Sergej Andrejev, Olga Ponomarova, Daniel R. Mende, Peer Bork, and Kiran Raosaheb Patil, which appeared in issue 20, May 19, 2015, of Proc Natl Acad Sci USA (112:6449–6454; first published May 4, 2015; 10.1073/pnas.1421834112).
The authors note the inadvertent omission of reference to an article by Freilich et al. during manuscript formatting. The authors would like to cite the article on page 6449, left column, line 22, where the reference callout “(8, 19–22)” should instead read “(8, 19–22, 40)”. Also, on page 6452, left column, line 8, the reference callout “(12, 28)” should instead read “(12, 28, 40).”
In addition, the authors would like to cite this article in the following text added in the beginning of Discussion: “The association between metabolic interactions and co-occurrence in microbial communities has been addressed in a previous study (40). That study, based on models of binary communities, found that co-occurring communities could be distinguished from the niche-associated ones by increased competition, but not by cooperation. In contrast, we show, by simulating higher-order communities (to better represent ecological complexity) and without resorting to a growth optimality assumption (for which there is yet little evidence), that metabolic dependency is a hallmark of species co-occurrence. The distinction of co-occurring groups is evident in comparison to random assemblies as well as to habitat-filtered background. This further allowed us to carry out comprehensive simulations identifying metabolites that preferentially connect co-occurring species.”
The complete reference appears below.
40. Freilich S, et al. (2011) Competitive and cooperative metabolic interactions in bacterial communities. Nat Commun 2:589.