ArticleThe ISME journal2017
Cheating fosters species co-existence in well-mixed bacterial communities.
Article in The ISME journal, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 papers.
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Who cites it
37 citing papers in PubMed, 95 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Ecological design of high-performance synthetic microbial communities: from theoretical foundations to functional optimization.ISME communications · 2025Review
- A framework for understanding collective microbiome metabolism.Nature microbiology · 2024Review
- Microbial diversification is maintained in an experimentally evolved synthetic community.mSystems · 2024Article
- Article
- Interspecific competition prevents the proliferation of social cheaters in an unstructured environment.The ISME journal · 2024Article
- VaginalbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- When cheating turns into a stabilizing mechanism of plant-pollinator communities.PLoS biology · 2023Article
- Siderophore-mediated iron partition promotes dynamical coexistence between cooperators and cheaters.iScience · 2023Article
- Community composition drives siderophore dynamics in multispecies bacterial communities.BMC ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Thiamine-Mediated Microbial Interaction between Auxotrophic Rhodococcus ruber ZM07 and Prototrophic Cooperators in the Tetrahydrofuran-Degrading Microbial Community H-1.Microbiology spectrum · 2023Article
- Public good-driven release of heterogeneous resources leads to genotypic diversification of an isogenic yeast population.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2022Article
- Surface Motility Favors Codependent Interaction between Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Burkholderia cenocepacia.mSphere · 2022Article
- Exploring the roles of microbes in facilitating plant adaptation to climate change.The Biochemical journal · 2022Article
- Understanding Interaction Patterns within Deep-Sea Microbial Communities and Their Potential Applications.Marine drugs · 2022Review
- Microbiomes attached to fresh perennial ryegrass are temporally resilient and adapt to changing ecological niches.Microbiome · 2021Article
- Genome-resolved metagenomics reveals role of iron metabolism in drought-induced rhizosphere microbiome dynamics.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Metabolic modelling approaches for describing and engineering microbial communities.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2021Review
- The initial inoculation ratio regulates bacterial coculture interactions and metabolic capacity.The ISME journal · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Explaining the enormous biodiversity observed in bacterial communities is challenging because ecological theory predicts that competition between species occupying the same niche should lead to the exclusion of less competitive community members. Competitive exclusion should be particularly strong when species compete for a single limiting resource or live in unstructured habitats that offer no refuge for weaker competitors. Here, we describe the 'cheating effect', a form of intra-specific competition that can counterbalance between-species competition, thereby fostering biodiversity in unstructured habitats. Using experimental communities consisting of the strong competitor Pseudomonas aeruginosa (PA) and its weaker counterpart Burkholderia cenocepacia (BC), we show that co-existence is impossible when the two species compete for a single limiting resource, iron. However, when introducing a PA cheating mutant, which specifically exploits the iron-scavenging siderophores produced by the PA wild type, we found that biodiversity was preserved under well-mixed conditions where PA cheats could outcompete the PA wild type. Cheating fosters biodiversity in our system because it creates strong intra-specific competition, which equalizes fitness differences between PA and BC. Our study identifies cheating - typically considered a destructive element - as a constructive force in shaping biodiversity.
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Registered trials
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.