ArticlePLoS genetics2016
Experimental Evolution of Metabolic Dependency in Bacteria.
Article in PLoS genetics, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 73 papers.
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Who cites it
73 citing papers in PubMed.
- Amino acid availability influences Staphylococcus aureus interaction with the nasal microbiota in a strain- and community-specific manner.Microbiome · 2026Article
- Challenges and Future Directives of Synthetic Biology in Engineering Plant-Microbe Partnerships for Sustainable Agriculture.Biotechnology and bioengineering · 2026Review
- Obligate cross-feeding of metabolites is common in soil microbial communities.Nature microbiology · 2026Article
- Reciprocal cross-feeding between bacteria can limit the emergence of metabolic dependencies.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2026Article
- Growth rate-dependent mutations and phenotypic switching facilitate rapid adaptation.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2026Article
- Limits to the evolution of metabolic dependency in spatially structured microbial communities.iScience · 2026Article
- Sulfur Oxidation by New and Non-Canonical Bacteria in a Subsurface Flow Constructed Wetland Treating Domestic Wastewater.Microorganisms · 2026Article
- Spatial structure: shaping the ecology and evolution of microbial communities.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2026Review
- Experimental evolution in an era of molecular manipulation.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2026Review
- Interbacterial warfare in the human gut: insights from Bacteroidales' perspective.Gut microbes · 2025Review
- Metabolic interplay drives population cycles in a cross-feeding microbial community.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Genomic insights into Streptomyces albidoflavus SM254: tracing the putative signs of anti-Pseudogymnoascus destructans properties.Brazilian journal of microbiology : [publication of the Brazilian Society for Microbiology] · 2025Article
- Strengthen or Weaken: Evolutionary Directions of Cross-Feeding After Formation.Environmental microbiology reports · 2025Review
- Unique trajectory of gene family evolution from genomic analysis of nearly all known species in an ancient yeast lineage.Molecular systems biology · 2025Article
- Mutualism between degraders and nondegraders stabilizes the function of a natural biopolymer-degrading community.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Article
- Bacterial Amino Acid Auxotrophies Enable Energetically Costlier Proteomes.International journal of molecular sciences · 2025Article
- Microbial cross-feeding stabilized by segregation of a dependent mutant from its independent ancestor.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Vitamin auxotrophies shape microbial community assembly on model marine particles.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Genomic Pipeline for Analysis of Mutational Events in Bacteria.Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2025Article
13 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Bacteria frequently lose biosynthetic genes, thus making them dependent on an environmental uptake of the corresponding metabolite. Despite the ubiquity of this 'genome streamlining', it is generally unclear whether the concomitant loss of biosynthetic functions is favored by natural selection or rather caused by random genetic drift. Here we demonstrate experimentally that a loss of metabolic functions is strongly selected for when the corresponding metabolites can be derived from the environment. Serially propagating replicate populations of the bacterium Escherichia coli in amino acid-containing environments revealed that auxotrophic genotypes rapidly evolved in less than 2,000 generations in almost all replicate populations. Moreover, auxotrophs also evolved in environments lacking amino acids-yet to a much lesser extent. Loss of these biosynthetic functions was due to mutations in both structural and regulatory genes. In competition experiments performed in the presence of amino acids, auxotrophic mutants gained a significant fitness advantage over the evolutionary ancestor, suggesting their emergence was selectively favored. Interestingly, auxotrophic mutants derived amino acids not only via an environmental uptake, but also by cross-feeding from coexisting strains. Our results show that adaptive fitness benefits can favor biosynthetic loss-of-function mutants and drive the establishment of intricate metabolic interactions within microbial communities.
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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.