Biofilm cultivation facilitates coexistence and adaptive evolution in an industrial bacterial community

The majority of ecological, industrial and medical impacts of bacteria result from diverse communities containing multiple species. This diversity presents a significant challenge as co-cultivation of multiple bacterial species frequently leads to species being outcompeted and, with this, the possibility to manipulate, evolve and improve bacterial communities is lost. Ecological theory predicts that a solution to this problem will be to grow species in structured environments, which reduces the likelihood of competitive exclusion. Here, we explored the ability of cultivation in a structured environment to facilitate coexistence, evolution, and adaptation in an industrially important community: Lactococcus lactis and Leuconostoc mesenteroides frequently used as dairy starter cultures. As commonly occurs, passaging of these two species together in a liquid culture model led to the loss of one species in 6 of 20 lineages (30%). By contrast, when we co-cultured the two species as biofilms on beads, a stable coexistence was observed in all lineages studied for over 100 generations. Moreover, we show that the co-culture drove evolution of new high-yield variants, which compared to the ancestor grew more slowly, yielded more cells and had enhanced capability of biofilm formation. Importantly, we also show that these high-yield biofilm strains did not evolve when each species was passaged in monoculture in the biofilm model. Therefore, both co-culture and the biofilm model were conditional for these high-yield strains to evolve. Our study underlines the power of ecological thinking—namely, the importance of structured environments for coexistence—to facilitate cultivation, evolution, and adaptation of industrially important bacterial communities.