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Presence of a loner strain maintains cooperation and diversity in well-mixed bacterial communities

Cooperation and diversity abound in nature despite cooperators risking exploitation from defectors and superior competitors displacing weaker ones. Understanding the persistence of cooperation and diversity is therefore a major problem for evolutionary ecology, especially in the context of well-mixe...

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Autores principales: Inglis, R. F., Biernaskie, J. M., Gardner, A., Kümmerli, R.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: The Royal Society 2016
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4721107/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26763707
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2015.2682
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author Inglis, R. F.
Biernaskie, J. M.
Gardner, A.
Kümmerli, R.
author_facet Inglis, R. F.
Biernaskie, J. M.
Gardner, A.
Kümmerli, R.
author_sort Inglis, R. F.
collection PubMed
description Cooperation and diversity abound in nature despite cooperators risking exploitation from defectors and superior competitors displacing weaker ones. Understanding the persistence of cooperation and diversity is therefore a major problem for evolutionary ecology, especially in the context of well-mixed populations, where the potential for exploitation and displacement is greatest. Here, we demonstrate that a ‘loner effect’, described by economic game theorists, can maintain cooperation and diversity in real-world biological settings. We use mathematical models of public-good-producing bacteria to show that the presence of a loner strain, which produces an independent but relatively inefficient good, can lead to rock–paper–scissor dynamics, whereby cooperators outcompete loners, defectors outcompete cooperators and loners outcompete defectors. These model predictions are supported by our observations of evolutionary dynamics in well-mixed experimental communities of the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa. We find that the coexistence of cooperators and defectors that produce and exploit, respectively, the iron-scavenging siderophore pyoverdine, is stabilized by the presence of loners with an independent iron-uptake mechanism. Our results establish the loner effect as a simple and general driver of cooperation and diversity in environments that would otherwise favour defection and the erosion of diversity.
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spelling pubmed-47211072016-01-28 Presence of a loner strain maintains cooperation and diversity in well-mixed bacterial communities Inglis, R. F. Biernaskie, J. M. Gardner, A. Kümmerli, R. Proc Biol Sci Research Articles Cooperation and diversity abound in nature despite cooperators risking exploitation from defectors and superior competitors displacing weaker ones. Understanding the persistence of cooperation and diversity is therefore a major problem for evolutionary ecology, especially in the context of well-mixed populations, where the potential for exploitation and displacement is greatest. Here, we demonstrate that a ‘loner effect’, described by economic game theorists, can maintain cooperation and diversity in real-world biological settings. We use mathematical models of public-good-producing bacteria to show that the presence of a loner strain, which produces an independent but relatively inefficient good, can lead to rock–paper–scissor dynamics, whereby cooperators outcompete loners, defectors outcompete cooperators and loners outcompete defectors. These model predictions are supported by our observations of evolutionary dynamics in well-mixed experimental communities of the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa. We find that the coexistence of cooperators and defectors that produce and exploit, respectively, the iron-scavenging siderophore pyoverdine, is stabilized by the presence of loners with an independent iron-uptake mechanism. Our results establish the loner effect as a simple and general driver of cooperation and diversity in environments that would otherwise favour defection and the erosion of diversity. The Royal Society 2016-01-13 /pmc/articles/PMC4721107/ /pubmed/26763707 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2015.2682 Text en © 2016 The Authors. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Articles
Inglis, R. F.
Biernaskie, J. M.
Gardner, A.
Kümmerli, R.
Presence of a loner strain maintains cooperation and diversity in well-mixed bacterial communities
title Presence of a loner strain maintains cooperation and diversity in well-mixed bacterial communities
title_full Presence of a loner strain maintains cooperation and diversity in well-mixed bacterial communities
title_fullStr Presence of a loner strain maintains cooperation and diversity in well-mixed bacterial communities
title_full_unstemmed Presence of a loner strain maintains cooperation and diversity in well-mixed bacterial communities
title_short Presence of a loner strain maintains cooperation and diversity in well-mixed bacterial communities
title_sort presence of a loner strain maintains cooperation and diversity in well-mixed bacterial communities
topic Research Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4721107/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26763707
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2015.2682
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