Individual‐ versus group‐optimality in the production of secreted bacterial compounds

Autor: Konstanze T. Schiessl, Colette Bigosch, Daniel M. Cornforth, Michael Weigert, Rolf Kümmerli, Martin Ackermann, Adin Ross-Gillespie, Sam P. Brown
Přispěvatelé: University of Zurich
Rok vydání: 2019
Předmět:
0106 biological sciences
0301 basic medicine
division of labor
economy of scales
1100 General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
Computational biology
580 Plants (Botany)
Biology
Microbiology
010603 evolutionary biology
01 natural sciences
Article
03 medical and health sciences
chemistry.chemical_compound
10126 Department of Plant and Microbial Biology
1311 Genetics
Genetics
Production (economics)
Selection
Genetic
bacteria
optimal production
Group level
Ecology
Evolution
Behavior and Systematics
Pyoverdine
siderophores
group level selection
Biological Evolution
1105 Ecology
Evolution
Behavior and Systematics
030104 developmental biology
chemistry
Pseudomonas aeruginosa
General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
Oligopeptides
11493 Department of Quantitative Biomedicine
Function (biology)
Zdroj: Evolution
ISSN: 1558-5646
0014-3820
DOI: 10.1111/evo.13701
Popis: How unicellular organisms optimize the production of compounds is a fundamental biological question. While it is typically thought that production is optimized at the individual-cell level, secreted compounds could also allow for optimization at the group level, leading to a division of labor where a subset of cells produces and shares the compound with everyone. Using mathematical modelling, we show that the evolution of such division of labor depends on the cost function of compound production. Specifically, for any trait with saturating benefits, linear costs promote the evolution of uniform production levels across cells. Conversely, production costs that diminish with higher output levels favor the evolution of specialization – especially when compound shareability is high. When experimentally testing these predictions with pyoverdine, a secreted iron-scavenging compound produced by Pseudomonas aeruginosa, we found linear costs and, consistent with our model, detected uniform pyoverdine production levels across cells. We conclude that for shared compounds with saturating benefits, the evolution of division of labor is facilitated by a diminishing cost function. More generally, we note that shifts in the level of selection from individuals to groups do not solely require cooperation, but critically depend on mechanistic factors, including the distribution of compound synthesis costs.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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