Since a celebrated experiment by Monod in 1949, we know that microbes can adapt their metabolic strategies in response to their environment, thus uptaking different nutrients at different rates depending on their relative quality and availability. It is currently unclear whether this physiological plasticity of microbes contributes to maintaining the high degree of diversity found in natural microbial communities, even in the presence of very few resources. By introducing dynamic and optimal metabolic strategies in consumer- resource models, we show that we can correctly reproduce the experimental growth of Saccharomyces cerevisiae on two different resources and we show that dynamic metabolic strategies allow the community to self-organize and to ensure the coexistence of multiple species competing for few resources
