From a microbial interaction (left) between two bacteria (green and blue), questions (center) are asked within the framework to help encode the interaction into a set of binary attributes and further stored in the catalog (right).
Microorganisms engage in interactions in all environments. However the specifics of what participants are involved, where exactly it happens, what compounds are involved, how much such niceties cost to each partner are hard to unravel and comprehend.
Following a long-standing tradition of classification in biology, Pacheco and Segrè (2019) innovated by suggesting a framework to systematically partition microbial interactions that goes beyond the outcomes of the participants.
While probably no framework would fit the ever-changing and full of exceptions world of microbes, the framework used here attempt to convert studied microbial interactions into encoded attributes for ease in exploration, comparison and future quantitative analyses.
Encoding a microbial interations between 2 or 3 participants boils down to answering the following nine questions.
For more details on the framework definitions, have a look at the README on the project repository and the original article.
