ReviewProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2011
Evolution of cooperation and control of cheating in a social microbe.
Review in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 94 papers.
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Who cites it
94 citing papers in PubMed.
- Cell division timing shapes the morphology and size of nascent multicellular organisms.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Effects of prey quality through the life cycle of the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum.BMC molecular and cell biology · 2026Article
- Article
- Identification of Slime Mold Metabolites That Confer Protection to Commercial Crops against Root-Knot Nematodes.Journal of agricultural and food chemistry · 2025Article
- Testing the coordination hypothesis: incompatibilities in aggregative development of an experimentally evolved social amoeba.Evolution letters · 2025Article
- Simulated Heat Waves Affect Cell Fate and Fitness in the Social Amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum.Microbial ecology · 2025Article
- Cell size and selection for stress-induced cell fusion in unicellular eukaryotes.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Symbiotic T6SS affects horizontal transmission ofISME communications · 2025Article
- Going against the family: Perturbation of a greenbeard pathway leads to falsebeard cheating.iScience · 2024Article
- Complex third-party effects in theProceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Cell-cell transfer of adaptation traits benefits kin and actor in a cooperative microbe.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Facultative symbiont virulence determines horizontal transmission rate without host specificity inEvolution letters · 2024Article
- Costs of being a diet generalist for the protist predatorProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- In the social amoebaPeerJ · 2024Article
- Parallel evolution of the G protein-coupled receptor GrlG and the loss of fruiting body formation in the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum evolved under low relatedness.G3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2023Article
- Reduced social function in experimentally evolvedProceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- SOCfinder: a genomic tool for identifying social genes in bacteria.Microbial genomics · 2023Article
- The impact of food availability on tumorigenesis is evolutionarily conserved.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Equilibria and oscillations in cheat-cooperator dynamics.Evolution letters · 2023Article
- Symbiotic bacteria, immune-like sentinel cells, and the response to pathogens in a social amoeba.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
34 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Much of what we know about the evolution of altruism comes from animals. Here, we show that studying a microbe has yielded unique insights, particularly in understanding how social cheaters are controlled. The social stage of Dictylostelium discoideum occurs when the amoebae run out of their bacterial prey and aggregate into a multicellular, motile slug. This slug forms a fruiting body in which about a fifth of cells die to form a stalk that supports the remaining cells as they form hardy dispersal-ready spores. Because this social stage forms from aggregation, it is analogous to a social group, or a chimeric multicellular organism, and is vulnerable to internal conflict. Advances in cell labeling, microscopy, single-gene knockouts, and genomics, as well as the results of decades of study of D. discoideum as a model for development, allow us to explore the genetic basis of social contests and control of cheaters in unprecedented detail. Cheaters are limited from exploiting other clones by high relatedness, kin discrimination, pleiotropy, noble resistance, and lottery-like role assignment. The active nature of these limits is reflected in the elevated rates of change in social genes compared with nonsocial genes. Despite control of cheaters, some conflict is still expressed in chimeras, with slower movement of slugs, slightly decreased investment in stalk compared with spore cells, and differential contributions to stalk and spores. D. discoideum is rapidly becoming a model system of choice for molecular studies of social evolution.
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