Contribution of genome scale metabolic modeling to niche theory

Standard niche modeling is based on probabilistic inference from organismal occurrence data but does not benefit yet from genome-scale descriptions of these organisms. This study over-comes this shortcoming by proposing a new conceptual niche that encompasses the whole metabolic capabilities of an organism. The so-called metabolic niche resumes well-known traits such as nutrient needs and their dependencies for survival. Despite the computational challenge, its implementation allows the detection of traits and the formal comparison of niches of different organisms, emphasizing that the presence-absence of functional genes is not enough to approximate the phenotype. Further statistical exploration of an organism’s niche sheds light on genes essential for the metabolic niche and their role in understanding various biological experiments, such as transcriptomics, paving the way for incorporating better the genome-scale description in ecological studies.