ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2011
Social conflict drives the evolutionary divergence of quorum sensing.
Article 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 43 papers.
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Who cites it
43 citing papers in PubMed.
- Analysis of the DNA-binding domain of thebioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Inactivation of MexT inJournal of bacteriology · 2026Article
- Diverse quorum sensing systems regulate microbial communication and biogeochemical processes in deep-sea cold seeps.Microbiome · 2025Article
- Inactivation of MexT inbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Frequency of quorum-sensing mutations inMicrobiology (Reading, England) · 2022Article
- The evolution of manipulative cheating.eLife · 2022Article
- Article
- Intertemporal trade-off between population growth rate and carrying capacity during public good production.iScience · 2022Article
- Public communication can facilitate low-risk coordination under surveillance.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Species-Wide Phylogenomics of the Staphylococcus aureusMicrobiology spectrum · 2022Article
- Article
- A Bacterial Tower of Babel: Quorum-Sensing Signaling Diversity and Its Evolution.Annual review of microbiology · 2020Review
- Article
- In silico bacteria evolve robust cooperaion via complex quorum-sensing strategies.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Behavioral heterogeneity in quorum sensing can stabilize social cooperation in microbial populations.BMC biology · 2019Article
- Social behaviours by Bacillus subtilis: quorum sensing, kin discrimination and beyond.Molecular microbiology · 2018Review
- Eavesdropping and crosstalk between secreted quorum sensing peptide signals that regulate bacteriocin production in Streptococcus pneumoniae.The ISME journal · 2018Article
- Article
- Evolution of new regulatory functions on biophysically realistic fitness landscapes.Nature communications · 2017Article
- Quorum-quenching limits quorum-sensing exploitation by signal-negative invaders.Scientific reports · 2017Article
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Abstract
In microbial "quorum sensing" (QS) communication systems, microbes produce and respond to a signaling molecule, enabling a cooperative response at high cell densities. Many species of bacteria show fast, intraspecific, evolutionary divergence of their QS pathway specificity--signaling molecules activate cognate receptors in the same strain but fail to activate, and sometimes inhibit, those of other strains. Despite many molecular studies, it has remained unclear how a signaling molecule and receptor can coevolve, what maintains diversity, and what drives the evolution of cross-inhibition. Here I use mathematical analysis to show that when QS controls the production of extracellular enzymes--"public goods"--diversification can readily evolve. Coevolution is positively selected by cycles of alternating "cheating" receptor mutations and "cheating immunity" signaling mutations. The maintenance of diversity and the evolution of cross-inhibition between strains are facilitated by facultative cheating between the competing strains. My results suggest a role for complex social strategies in the long-term evolution of QS systems. More generally, my model of QS divergence suggests a form of kin recognition where different kin types coexist in unstructured populations.
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