Microbial communities are ubiquitous and play crucial roles in many natural processes. Despite their importance for the environment, industry and human health, there are still many aspects of microbial community dynamics that we do not understand quantitatively. Recent experiments have shown that the structure and composition of microbial communities are intertwined with the metabolism of the species that inhabit them, suggesting that properties at the intracellular level such as the allocation of cellular proteomic resources must be taken into account when describing microbial communities with a population dynamics approach. In this work, we reconsider one of the theoretical frameworks most commonly used to model population dynamics in competitive ecosystems, MacArthur’s consumer-resource model, in light of experimental evidence showing how proteome allocation affects microbial growth. This new framework allows us to describe community dynamics at an intermediate level of complexity between classical consumer-resource models and biochemical models of microbial metabolism, accounting for temporally-varying proteome allocation subject to constraints on growth and protein synthesis in the presence of multiple resources, while preserving analytical insight into the dynamics of the system. We first show with a simple experiment that proteome allocation needs to be accounted for to properly understand the dynamics of even the simplest microbial community, i.e. two bacterial strains competing for one common resource. Then, we study our consumer-proteome-resource model analytically and numerically to determine the conditions that allow multiple species to coexist in systems with arbitrary numbers of species and resources.

微生物群落无处不在，在许多自然过程中发挥着至关重要的作用。尽管它们对环境、工业和人类健康很重要，但我们仍然无法定量了解微生物群落动态的许多方面。最近的实验表明，微生物群落的结构和组成与栖息在其中的物种的新陈代谢交织在一起，这表明在描述具有人口动态方法。在这项工作中，我们重新考虑了最常用于模拟竞争生态系统中人口动态的理论框架之一，麦克阿瑟的消费者资源模型，根据表明蛋白质组分配如何影响微生物生长的实验证据。这个新框架使我们能够描述介于经典消费者资源模型和微生物代谢生化模型之间的复杂性中间水平的群落动态，解释在存在多种资源的情况下受生长和蛋白质合成限制的时间变化的蛋白质组分配，同时保留对系统动态的分析洞察力。我们首先通过一个简单的实验表明，需要考虑蛋白质组分配以正确理解即使是最简单的微生物群落的动态，即两种细菌菌株竞争一种公共资源。然后，