Correction: Integrated culturing, modeling and transcriptomics uncovers complex interactions and emergent behavior in a three-species synthetic gut community

The composition of the human gut microbiome is well resolved, but predictive
understanding of its dynamics is still lacking. Here, we followed a bottom-up strategy to explore
human gut community dynamics: we established a synthetic community composed of three
representative human gut isolates (Roseburia intestinalis L1-82, Faecalibacterium prausnitzii A2-165
and Blautia hydrogenotrophica S5a33) and explored their interactions under well-controlled
conditions in vitro. Systematic mono- and pair-wise fermentation experiments confirmed
competition for fructose and cross-feeding of formate. We quantified with a mechanistic model
how well tri-culture dynamics was predicted from mono-culture data. With the model as reference,
we demonstrated that strains grown in co-culture behaved differently than those in mono-culture
and confirmed their altered behavior at the transcriptional level. In addition, we showed with
replicate tri-cultures and simulations that dominance in tri-culture sensitively depends on the initial
conditions. Our work has important implications for gut microbial community modeling as well as
for ecological interaction detection from batch cultures.