Opatovsky, I., The Agricultural Research Organization, Newe Ya'ar Research Center, Ramat Yishay, Israel, Agricultural Research and Development Center, Southern Branch (Besor), Israel; Santos-Garcia, D., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Department of Entomology, Rehovot, Israel; Ruan, Z., The Agricultural Research Organization, Newe Ya'ar Research Center, Ramat Yishay, Israel, College of Life Sciences, Nanjing Agricultural University, Department of Microbiology, Nanjing, China; Lahav, T., The Agricultural Research Organization, Newe Ya'ar Research Center, Ramat Yishay, Israel; Ofaim, S., The Agricultural Research Organization, Newe Ya'ar Research Center, Ramat Yishay, Israel; Mouton, L., Université de Lyon, Université Claude Bernard, CNRS, Laboratoire de Biométrie et Biologie Evolutive UMR CNRS 5558, Villeurbanne, France; Barbe, V., GenoscopeCEA, Genoscope, Institut de biologie François-Jacob, Evry, France; Jiang, J., College of Life Sciences, Nanjing Agricultural University, Department of Microbiology, Nanjing, China; Zchori-Fein, E., The Agricultural Research Organization, Newe Ya'ar Research Center, Ramat Yishay, Israel; Freilich, S., The Agricultural Research Organization, Newe Ya'ar Research Center, Ramat Yishay, Israel

Background: Individual organisms are linked to their communities and ecosystems via metabolic activities. Metabolic exchanges and co-dependencies have long been suggested to have a pivotal role in determining community structure. In phloem-feeding insects such metabolic interactions with bacteria enable complementation of their deprived nutrition. The phloem-feeding whitefly Bemisia tabaci (Hemiptera: Aleyrodidae) harbors an obligatory symbiotic bacterium, as well as varying combinations of facultative symbionts. This well-defined bacterial community in B. tabaci serves here as a case study for a comprehensive and systematic survey of metabolic interactions within the bacterial community and their associations with documented occurrences of bacterial combinations. We first reconstructed the metabolic networks of five common B. tabaci symbionts genera (Portiera, Rickettsia, Hamiltonella, Cardinium and Wolbachia), and then used network analysis approaches to predict: (1) species-specific metabolic capacities in a simulated bacteriocyte-like environment; (2) metabolic capacities of the corresponding species' combinations, and (3) dependencies of each species on different media components. Results: The predictions for metabolic capacities of the symbionts in the host environment were in general agreement with previously reported genome analyses, each focused on the single-species level. The analysis suggests several previously un-reported routes for complementary interactions and estimated the dependency of each symbiont in specific host metabolites. No clear association was detected between metabolic co-dependencies and co-occurrence patterns. Conclusions: The analysis generated predictions for testable hypotheses of metabolic exchanges and co-dependencies in bacterial communities and by crossing them with co-occurrence profiles, contextualized interaction patterns into a wider ecological perspective. © 2018 The Author(s).