ArticleJournal of bacteriology2017
Maintenance of Microbial Cooperation Mediated by Public Goods in Single- and Multiple-Trait Scenarios
Article in Journal of bacteriology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 53 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
53 citing papers in PubMed.
- Review
- Cooperation, Defection, and Collapse: A Multiscale Game Theory Framework for Emphysema Progression.Cells · 2026Review
- Siderophore sharing protects clonalApplied and environmental microbiology · 2026Article
- The embryo game uncovers hidden cell behaviours.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Rethinking Microbial Chemical Ecology: Secondary Metabolites as Concentration-Dependent Signaling Hubs with Implications for Anti-Virulence Intervention.Microorganisms · 2026Review
- Bottleneck size drives the evolution of cooperative traits in an aggregative multicellular myxobacterium.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Higher levels of antibiotic resistance are less competitive: the hidden ecological cost of no-metabolic cost resistance.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Early-stage reciprocal cooperation between the arbuscular mycorrhizal fungus Rhizophagus irregularis and the phosphate-solubilizing bacterium Rahnella aquatilis is dependent on external phosphorus availability.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Toxic cultures: e-cigarettes and the oral microbial exposome.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2025Article
- An anticipatory mechanism enhances the cooperative behaviors of quorum sensing mutants in Pseudomonas aeruginosa.PLoS pathogens · 2025Article
- Population-level control of two manganese oxidases expands the niche for bacterial manganese biomineralization.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2025Article
- Quorum sensing in Saccharomyces cerevisiae brewing strains: effects of 2-phenylethanol on proteomic, lipidomic, and metabolomic profile.FEMS yeast research · 2025Article
- Excitation of filamentous growth in Dekkera spp. by quorum sensing aromatic alcohols 2-phenylethanol and tryptophol.FEMS microbiology letters · 2025Article
- Mechanisms of cooperation in the plants-arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi-bacteria continuum.The ISME journal · 2025Review
- Plasmid-free cheater cells commonly evolve during laboratory growth.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2024Article
- Increased privatization of a public resource leads to spread of cooperation in a microbial population.Microbiology spectrum · 2024Article
- Bacterial growth and environmental adaptation via thiamine biosynthesis and thiamine-mediated metabolic interactions.The ISME journal · 2024Article
- Trojan horselike T6SS effector TepC mediates both interference competition and exploitative competition.The ISME journal · 2024Article
- Review
- Myxobacteria restrain Phytophthora invasion by scavenging thiamine in soybean rhizosphere via outer membrane vesicle-secreted thiaminase I.Nature communications · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Microbes often form densely populated communities, which favor competitive and cooperative interactions. Cooperation among bacteria often occurs through the production of metabolically costly molecules produced by certain individuals that become available to other neighboring individuals; such molecules are called public goods. This type of cooperation is susceptible to exploitation, since nonproducers of a public good can benefit from it while saving the cost of its production (cheating), gaining a fitness advantage over producers (cooperators). Thus, in mixed cultures, cheaters can increase in frequency in the population, relative to cooperators. Sometimes, and as predicted by simple game-theoretic arguments, such increases in the frequency of cheaters cause loss of the cooperative traits by exhaustion of the public goods, eventually leading to a collapse of the entire population. In other cases, however, both cooperators and cheaters remain in coexistence. This raises the question of how cooperation is maintained in microbial populations. Several strategies to prevent cheating have been studied in the context of a single trait and a unique environmental constraint. In this review, we describe current knowledge on the evolutionary stability of microbial cooperation and discuss recent discoveries describing the mechanisms operating in multiple-trait and multiple-constraint settings. We conclude with a consideration of the consequences of these complex interactions, and we briefly discuss the potential role of social interactions involving multiple traits and multiple environmental constraints in the evolution of specialization and division of labor in microbes.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.