Chemical weapons are recent acquisi- tions in humankind's ever-growing ar- senal of destruction. But bacteria and fungi have been practicing chemical war- fare for a very long time. Among the numerous and structurally diverse anti- microbial agents that microbes produce are penicillin by the mold Penicillium no- tatum, many important antibiotics by streptomycetes, a wide range of bacterio- cins by Escherichia coli and most other bacteria (including the food preservative, nisin, by Lactococcus lactis), and killer toxins by the yeast Saccharomyces cerevi- siae. In this issue of PNAS, Czárán, Hoek- stra, and Pagie (1) perform numerical simulations to examine the effects of these interactions on microbial diversity.
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