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The dynamics of microbial communities is incredibly complex, determined bycompetition for metabolic substrates and cross-feeding of byproducts. Speciesin the community grow by harvesting energy from chemical reactions thattransform substrates to products. In many anoxic environments, these reactionsare close to thermodynamic equilibrium and growth is slow. To understand thecommunity structure in these energy-limited environments, we developed amicrobial community consumer-resource model incorporating energetic andthermodynamic constraints on an interconnected metabolic network. The centralingredient of the model is product inhibition, meaning that microbial growthmay be limited not only by depletion of metabolic substrates but also byaccumulation of products. We demonstrate that these additional constraints onmicrobial growth cause a convergence in the structure and function of thecommunity metabolic network -- independent of species composition andbiochemical details -- providing a possible explanation for convergence ofcommunity function despite taxonomic variation observed in many natural andindustrial environments. Furthermore, we discovered that the structure ofcommunity metabolic network is governed by the thermodynamic principle ofmaximum heat dissipation. Overall, the work demonstrates how universalthermodynamic principles may constrain community metabolism and explainobserved functional convergence in microbial communities.

Functional universality in slow-growing microbial communities arises from thermodynamic constraints