ArticleCurrent biology : CB2009
Social conflict in centimeter-and global-scale populations of the bacterium Myxococcus xanthus.
Article in Current biology : CB, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 74 papers.
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74 citing papers in PubMed.
- Aggregative chimeric multicellularity in the absence of lethal kin discrimination.The ISME journal · 2026Article
- Predation, evo-devo, and historical contingency: A nematode predator drives evolution of aggregative multicellularity.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Mechanisms of cooperation in the plants-arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi-bacteria continuum.The ISME journal · 2025Review
- Ecological histories govern social exploitation by microorganisms.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- The Limits of Our Explanation: A Case Study inBiological theory · 2025Article
- Mutation Rate and Effective Population Size of the Model Cooperative Bacterium Myxococcus xanthus.Genome biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Killer prey: Ecology reverses bacterial predation.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- The effect of cooperator recognition on competition among clones in spatially structured microbial communities.PloS one · 2024Article
- SOCfinder: a genomic tool for identifying social genes in bacteria.Microbial genomics · 2023Article
- Two reasons to kill: predation and kin discrimination in myxobacteria.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2023Review
- Whole-Genome Sequence ofMicrobiology resource announcements · 2023Article
- Review
- Editorial: Unicellular organisms as an evolutionary snapshot toward multicellularity.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2023Article
- Allopatric divergence of cooperators confers cheating resistance and limits effects of a defector mutation.BMC ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Kin Discrimination Modifies Strain Distribution, Spatial Segregation, and Incorporation of Extracellular Matrix Polysaccharide Mutants of Bacillus subtilis Strains into Mixed Floating Biofilms.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2022Article
- Why have aggregative multicellular organisms stayed simple?Current genetics · 2021Review
- Social selection within aggregative multicellular development drives morphological evolution.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Complete Genome Sequence ofMicrobiology resource announcements · 2021Article
- Local adaptation, geographical distance and phylogenetic relatedness: Assessing the drivers of siderophore-mediated social interactions in natural bacterial communities.Journal of evolutionary biology · 2021Article
- A Natural Product Chemist's Guide to Unlocking Silent Biosynthetic Gene Clusters.Annual review of biochemistry · 2021Review
14 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Abstract
Social interactions among microbes that engage in cooperative behaviors are well studied in laboratory contexts [1, 2], but little is known about the scales at which initially cooperative microbes diversify into socially conflicting genotypes in nature. The predatory soil bacterium Myxococcus xanthus responds to starvation by cooperatively forming multicellular fruiting bodies in which a portion of the population differentiates into stress-resistant spores [3, 4]. Natural M. xanthus populations are spatially structured [5], and genetically divergent isolates from distant origins exhibit striking developmental antagonisms that decrease spore production in chimeric fruiting bodies [6]. Here we show that genetically similar isolates of M. xanthus from a centimeter-scale population [7] also exhibit strong and pervasive antagonisms when mixed in development. Negative responses to chimerism were less intense on average among local strains than among global isolates, although no significant correlation was found between genetic distance at multilocus sequence typing (MLST) loci and the degree of social asymmetry between competitors. A test for self/nonself discrimination during vegetative swarming revealed a great diversity of distinct self-recognition types even among identical MLST genotypes. Such nonself exclusion may serve to direct the benefits of cooperation to close kin within diverse populations in which the probability of social conflict among neighbors is high.
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