ArticlePloS one2012
Life history trade-offs and relaxed selection can decrease bacterial virulence in environmental reservoirs.
Article in PloS one, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed, 53 citations in OpenAlex.
- Virulent Parasites Emerge in Hosts With Rising Temperatures.Global change biology · 2026Article
- Genomic and phenotypic diversification ofMicrobiology spectrum · 2026Article
- Coevolution of host resistance and pathogen exploitation in a propagule-mediated infection model.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Dissecting transmission to understand parasite evolution.PLoS pathogens · 2025Review
- Differential stress responsiveness determines intraspecies virulence heterogeneity and host adaptation in Listeria monocytogenes.Nature microbiology · 2024Article
- Making a Pathogen? Evaluating the Impact of Protist Predation on the Evolution of Virulence in Serratia marcescens.Genome biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Antibiotic Resistance in Plant Pathogenic Bacteria: Recent Data and Environmental Impact of Unchecked Use and the Potential of Biocontrol Agents as an Eco-Friendly Alternative.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Article
- Metabolic efficiency reshapes the seminal relationship between pathogen growth rate and virulence.Ecology letters · 2023Article
- The effect of a temperature-sensitive prophage on the evolution of virulence in an opportunistic bacterial pathogen.Molecular ecology · 2022Article
- The roles of environmental variation and parasite survival in virulence-transmission relationships.Royal Society open science · 2021Review
- Broad thermal tolerance is negatively correlated with virulence in an opportunistic bacterial pathogen.Evolutionary applications · 2018Article
- Article
- Ecological and evolutionary dynamics of a model facultative pathogen: Agrobacterium and crown gall disease of plants.Environmental microbiology · 2018Review
- Growth rate, transmission mode and virulence in human pathogens.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Article
- Relative importance of evolutionary dynamics depends on the composition of microbial predator-prey community.The ISME journal · 2016Article
- The adaptive evolution of virulence: a review of theoretical predictions and empirical tests.Parasitology · 2016Review
- Bacterial Human Virulence Genes across Diverse Habitats As Assessed byFrontiers in microbiology · 2016Article
- PrfA regulation offsets the cost of Listeria virulence outside the host.Environmental microbiology · 2015Article
- The evolution of reduced antagonism--A role for host-parasite coevolution.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2015Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Pathogen virulence is usually thought to evolve in reciprocal selection with the host. While this might be true for obligate pathogens, the life histories of opportunistic pathogens typically alternate between within-host and outside-host environments during the infection-transmission cycle. As a result, opportunistic pathogens are likely to experience conflicting selection pressures across different environments, and this could affect their virulence through life-history trait correlations. We studied these correlations experimentally by exposing an opportunistic bacterial pathogen Serratia marcescens to its natural protist predator Tetrahymena thermophila for 13 weeks, after which we measured changes in bacterial traits related to both anti-predator defence and virulence. We found that anti-predator adaptation (producing predator-resistant biofilm) caused a correlative attenuation in virulence. Even though the direct mechanism was not found, reduction in virulence was most clearly connected to a predator-driven loss of a red bacterial pigment, prodigiosin. Moreover, life-history trait evolution was more divergent among replicate populations in the absence of predation, leading also to lowered virulence in some of the 'predator absent' selection lines. Together these findings suggest that the virulence of non-obligatory, opportunistic bacterial pathogens can decrease in environmental reservoirs through life history trade-offs, or random accumulation of mutations that impair virulence traits under relaxed selection.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.