ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2014
Erosion of functional independence early in the evolution of a microbial mutualism.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers.
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Who cites it
32 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Membrane changes during syntrophic interactions of an archaeal-bacterial coculture.BMC microbiology · 2025Article
- The evolution of reduced facilitation in a four-species bacterial community.Evolution letters · 2024Article
- Origin of biogeographically distinct ecotypes during laboratory evolution.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Evolutionary repeatability of emergent properties of ecological communities.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Species interactions constrain adaptation and preserve ecological stability in an experimental microbial community.The ISME journal · 2022Article
- Exchange of Vitamin BJournal of bacteriology · 2022Article
- Construction of Environmental Synthetic Microbial Consortia: Based on Engineering and Ecological Principles.Frontiers in microbiology · 2022Review
- Synergistic epistasis enhances the co-operativity of mutualistic interspecies interactions.The ISME journal · 2021Article
- Engineering Cooperation in an Anaerobic Coculture.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2021Article
- Extracellular Metabolism Sets the Table for Microbial Cross-Feeding.Microbiology and molecular biology reviews : MMBR · 2021Review
- Rapid evolution destabilizes species interactions in a fluctuating environment.The ISME journal · 2021Article
- The Syntrophy hypothesis for the origin of eukaryotes revisited.Nature microbiology · 2020Review
- Novel Mode of Molybdate Inhibition ofFrontiers in microbiology · 2020Article
- From Microbial Communities to Distributed Computing Systems.Frontiers in bioengineering and biotechnology · 2020Review
- Syntrophy emerges spontaneously in complex metabolic systems.PLoS computational biology · 2019Article
- Substrate cross-feeding affects the speed and trajectory of molecular evolution within a synthetic microbial assemblage.BMC evolutionary biology · 2019Article
- Increasing sulfate levels show a differential impact on synthetic communities comprising different methanogens and a sulfate reducer.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2019Article
- The genetic basis for adaptation of model-designed syntrophic co-cultures.PLoS computational biology · 2019Article
- Towards a systematic understanding of differences between archaeal and bacterial diversity.Environmental microbiology reports · 2019Article
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13 authors.
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Abstract
Many species have evolved to function as specialized mutualists, often to the detriment of their ability to survive independently. However, there are few, if any, well-controlled observations of the evolutionary processes underlying the genesis of new mutualisms. Here, we show that within the first 1,000 generations of initiating independent syntrophic interactions between a sulfate reducer (Desulfovibrio vulgaris) and a hydrogenotrophic methanogen (Methanococcus maripaludis), D. vulgaris frequently lost the capacity to grow by sulfate respiration, thus losing the primary physiological attribute of the genus. The loss of sulfate respiration was a consequence of mutations in one or more of three key genes in the pathway for sulfate respiration, required for sulfate activation (sat) and sulfate reduction to sulfite (apsA or apsB). Because loss-of-function mutations arose rapidly and independently in replicated experiments, and because these mutations were correlated with enhanced growth rate and productivity, gene loss could be attributed to natural selection, even though these mutations should significantly restrict the independence of the evolved D. vulgaris. Together, these data present an empirical demonstration that specialization for a mutualistic interaction can evolve by natural selection shortly after its origin. They also demonstrate that a sulfate-reducing bacterium can readily evolve to become a specialized syntroph, a situation that may have often occurred in nature.
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