ArticleNature communications2016
Experimental evolution reveals that high relatedness protects multicellular cooperation from cheaters.
Article in Nature communications, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers.
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Who cites it
35 citing papers in PubMed.
- NOD-Like Receptor Genes Undergo Diversity-Enhancing Evolution in a Fungal Species Complex.Genome biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Regulated cell death in fungi from a comparative immunology perspective.Cell death and differentiation · 2026Review
- Bottleneck size drives the evolution of cooperative traits in an aggregative multicellular myxobacterium.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- TheJournal of fungi (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Reconstructing NOD-like receptor alleles with high internal conservation inMicrobial genomics · 2025Article
- The Narrow Footprint of Ancient Balancing Selection Revealed by Heterokaryon Incompatibility Genes in Aspergillus fumigatus.Molecular biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Identification of a common secondary mutation in theMicrobiology spectrum · 2023Article
- Multispecies interactions shape the transition to multicellularity.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Longevity of Fungal Mycelia and Nuclear Quality Checks: a New Hypothesis for the Role of Clamp Connections in Dikaryons.Microbiology and molecular biology reviews : MMBR · 2023Review
- The evolutionary ecology of fungal killer phenotypes.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Article
- Impact of direct physical association and motility on fitness of a synthetic interkingdom microbial community.The ISME journal · 2023Article
- Article
- Multicellularity in animals: The potential for within-organism conflict.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- A personal cost of cheating can stabilize reproductive altruism during the early evolution of clonal multicellularity.Biology letters · 2022Article
- Modeling the consequences of the dikaryotic life cycle of mushroom-forming fungi on genomic conflict.eLife · 2022Article
- A Nuclei-Based Conceptual Model of (Eco)evolutionary Dynamics in Fungal Heterokaryons.Frontiers in microbiology · 2022Article
- Ecology drives the evolution of diverse social strategies in Pseudomonas aeruginosa.Molecular ecology · 2021Article
- Ten recent insights for our understanding of cooperation.Nature ecology & evolution · 2021Review
- Somatic deficiency causes reproductive parasitism in a fungus.Nature communications · 2021Article
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3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In multicellular organisms, there is a potential risk that cheating mutants gain access to the germline. Development from a single-celled zygote resets relatedness among cells to its maximum value each generation, which should accomplish segregation of cheating mutants from non-cheaters and thereby protect multicellular cooperation. Here we provide the crucial direct comparison between high- and low-relatedness conditions to test this hypothesis. We allow two variants of the fungus Neurospora crassa to evolve, one with and one without the ability to form chimeras with other individuals, thus generating two relatedness levels. While multicellular cooperation remains high in the high-relatedness lines, it significantly decreases in all replicate low-relatedness lines, resulting in an average threefold decrease in spore yield. This reduction is caused by cheating mutants with reduced investment in somatic functions, but increased competitive success when fusing with non-cheaters. Our experiments demonstrate that high genetic relatedness is crucial to sustain multicellular cooperation.
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