ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2013
Altruism can evolve when relatedness is low: evidence from bacteria committing suicide upon phage infection.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2013. 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.
- DNA Repair Exhaustion Activates Orthocaspase-Mediated Cell Death and Promote Inclusive Fitness of Cyanobacterial Population Under Abiotic Stress.Plant, cell & environment · 2026Article
- Chemical suppression of a bacterial immune system revives repressed phages.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Review
- Expression level of anti-phage defence systems controls a trade-off between protection range and autoimmunity.Nature microbiology · 2025Article
- Ecological and evolutionary dynamics of cell-virus-virophage systems.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Interspecific competition prevents the proliferation of social cheaters in an unstructured environment.The ISME journal · 2024Article
- Coordinated proteome change precedes cell lysis and death in a mat-forming cyanobacterium.The ISME journal · 2023Article
- Is Aging an Inevitable Characteristic of Organic Life or an Evolutionary Adaptation?Biochemistry. Biokhimiia · 2022Review
- Evolution of prudent predation in complex food webs.Ecology letters · 2022Article
- Nonhuman rationality: a predictive coding perspective.Cognitive processing · 2021Article
- Strain Background, Species Frequency, and Environmental Conditions Are Important in Determining Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus Population Dynamics and Species Coexistence.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2020Article
- The tale of caspase homologues and their evolutionary outlook: deciphering programmed cell death in cyanobacteria.Journal of experimental botany · 2020Article
- The Evolution of Mass Cell Suicide in Bacterial Warfare.Current biology : CB · 2020Article
- Cell Death in Evolutionary Transitions in Individuality.The Yale journal of biology and medicine · 2019Review
- Suicidal selection: Programmed cell death can evolve in unicellular organisms due solely to kin selection.Ecology and evolution · 2019Article
- Adaptive suicide: is a kin-selected driver of fatal behaviours likely?Biology letters · 2019Review
- Division of Labor during Biofilm Matrix Production.Current biology : CB · 2018Article
- Siderophore cheating and cheating resistance shape competition for iron in soil and freshwater Pseudomonas communities.Nature communications · 2017Article
- Evolutionary Ecology of Prokaryotic Immune Mechanisms.Microbiology and molecular biology reviews : MMBR · 2016Review
- Immigration of susceptible hosts triggers the evolution of alternative parasite defence strategies.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2016Article
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3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
High relatedness among interacting individuals has generally been considered a precondition for the evolution of altruism. However, kin-selection theory also predicts the evolution of altruism when relatedness is low, as long as the cost of the altruistic act is minor compared with its benefit. Here, we demonstrate evidence for a low-cost altruistic act in bacteria. We investigated Escherichia coli responding to the attack of an obligately lytic phage by committing suicide in order to prevent parasite transmission to nearby relatives. We found that bacterial suicide provides large benefits to survivors at marginal costs to committers. The cost of suicide was low, because infected cells are moribund, rapidly dying upon phage infection, such that no more opportunity for reproduction remains. As a consequence of its marginal cost, host suicide was selectively favoured even when relatedness between committers and survivors approached zero. Altogether, our findings demonstrate that low-cost suicide can evolve with ease, represents an effective host-defence strategy, and seems to be widespread among microbes. Moreover, low-cost suicide might also occur in higher organisms as exemplified by infected social insect workers leaving the colony to die in isolation.
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