ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Facultative cheating supports the coexistence of diverse quorum-sensing alleles.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 42 papers.
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42 citing papers in PubMed.
- Initiation of swarming inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Regulatory rewiring drives intraspecies competition in Bacillus subtilis.PLoS genetics · 2026Article
- TheJournal of fungi (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Experimental evolution of yeast shows that public-goods upregulation can evolve despite challenges from exploitative non-producers.Nature communications · 2024Article
- A balancing act: investigations on the impact of altered signal sensitivity in bacterial quorum sensing.Journal of bacteriology · 2023Article
- SOCfinder: a genomic tool for identifying social genes in bacteria.Microbial genomics · 2023Article
- Major distinctions between the two oligopeptide permease systems ofMicrobiology (Reading, England) · 2023Article
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- Large-Scale Identification of Known and Novel RRNPP Quorum-Sensing Systems by RRNPP_Detector Captures Novel Features of Bacterial, Plasmidic, and Viral Coevolution.Molecular biology and evolution · 2023Article
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- Public good-driven release of heterogeneous resources leads to genotypic diversification of an isogenic yeast population.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2022Article
- The evolution of manipulative cheating.eLife · 2022Article
- Enterococcal biofilm-A nidus for antibiotic resistance transfer?Journal of applied microbiology · 2022Review
- Population Density Affects the Outcome of Competition in Co-cultures of Gardnerella Species Isolated from the Human Vaginal Microbiome.Microbial ecology · 2022Article
- Features of the Opportunistic Behaviour of the Marine BacteriumMicroorganisms · 2021Article
- Evaluating kin and group selection as tools for quantitative analysis of microbial data.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Cryptic surface-associated multicellularity emerges through cell adhesion and its regulation.PLoS biology · 2021Article
- Ten recent insights for our understanding of cooperation.Nature ecology & evolution · 2021Review
- Quorum sensing provides a molecular mechanism for evolution to tune and maintain investment in cooperation.The ISME journal · 2021Article
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Abstract
Bacterial quorum sensing enables bacteria to cooperate in a density-dependent manner via the group-wide secretion and detection of specific autoinducer molecules. Many bacterial species show high intraspecific diversity of autoinducer-receptor alleles, called pherotypes. The autoinducer produced by one pherotype activates its coencoded receptor, but not the receptor of another pherotype. It is unclear what selection forces drive the maintenance of pherotype diversity. Here, we use the ComQXPA system of Bacillus subtilis as a model system, to show that pherotype diversity can be maintained by facultative cheating--a minority pherotype exploits the majority, but resumes cooperation when its frequency increases. We find that the maintenance of multiple pherotypes by facultative cheating can persist under kin-selection conditions that select against "obligate cheaters" quorum-sensing response null mutants. Our results therefore support a role for facultative cheating and kin selection in the evolution of quorum-sensing diversity.
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