ArticleInfection and immunity2014
Cooperation, quorum sensing, and evolution of virulence in Staphylococcus aureus.
Article in Infection and immunity, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 69 papers.
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Who cites it
69 citing papers in PubMed, 121 citations in OpenAlex.
- Biophysical Constraints Dictate the Stability of Social Traits inbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Systematic engineering to enhance valencene production in Rhodobacter sphaeroides.Bioresources and bioprocessing · 2025Article
- Review
- An anticipatory mechanism enhances the cooperative behaviors of quorum sensing mutants in Pseudomonas aeruginosa.PLoS pathogens · 2025Article
- The mutational landscape of Staphylococcus aureus during colonisation.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Within-host competition causes pathogen molecular evolution and perpetual microbiota dysbiosis.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Article
- Exploiting cooperative pathogen behaviour for enhanced antibiotic potency: A Trojan horse approach.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2024Article
- Genes for cooperation are not more likely to be carried by plasmids.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Exploiting Cooperative Pathogen Behavior for Enhanced Antibiotic Potency: A Trojan Horse Approach.Research square · 2023Article
- Article
- Quorum sensing going wild.iScience · 2023Review
- Equilibria and oscillations in cheat-cooperator dynamics.Evolution letters · 2023Article
- Quorum-sensing, intra- and inter-species competition in the staphylococci.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2023Review
- Antibiotic treatment can exacerbate biofilm-associated infection by promoting quorum cheater development.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2023Article
- Selecting for infectivity across metapopulations can increase virulence in the social microbeEvolutionary applications · 2023Article
- Microscopy-based phenotypic profiling of infection by Staphylococcus aureus clinical isolates reveals intracellular lifestyle as a prevalent feature.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Antibiotics Drive Expansion of Rare Pathogens in a Chronic Infection Microbiome Model.mSphere · 2022Article
- Reconstitution of theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Demographic Expansions and the Emergence of Host Specialization in Genetically Distinct Ecotypes of the Tick-Transmitted Bacterium Anaplasma phagocytophilum.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2022Article
9 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The virulence and fitness in vivo of the major human pathogen Staphylococcus aureus are associated with a cell-to-cell signaling mechanism known as quorum sensing (QS). QS coordinates the production of virulence factors via the production and sensing of autoinducing peptide (AIP) signal molecules by the agr locus. Here we show, in a wax moth larva virulence model, that (i) QS in S. aureus is a cooperative social trait that provides a benefit to the local population of cells, (ii) agr mutants, which do not produce or respond to QS signal, are able to exploit the benefits provided by the QS of others ("cheat"), allowing them to increase in frequency when in mixed populations with cooperators, (iii) these social interactions between cells determine virulence, with the host mortality rate being negatively correlated to the percentage of agr mutants ("cheats") in a population, and (iv) a higher within-host relatedness (lower strain diversity) selects for QS and hence higher virulence. Our results provide an explanation for why agr mutants show reduced virulence in animal models but can be isolated from infections of humans. More generally, by providing the first evidence that QS is a cooperative social behavior in a Gram-positive bacterium, our results suggest convergent, and potentially widespread, evolution for signaling to coordinate cooperation in bacteria.
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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.