ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
Genetic signatures of microbial altruism and cheating in social amoebas in the wild.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 61 citations in OpenAlex.
- The Evolutionary and Ecological Consequences of Cooperation.The American naturalist · 2026Review
- Hypermutable hotspot enables the rapid evolution of self/non-self recognition genes inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Linked selection and the evolution of altruism in family-structured populations.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Parallel evolution of the G protein-coupled receptor GrlG and the loss of fruiting body formation in the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum evolved under low relatedness.G3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2023Article
- Reduced social function in experimentally evolvedProceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Dynamic altruistic cooperation within breast tumors.Molecular cancer · 2023Article
- Open questions in the social lives of viruses.Journal of evolutionary biology · 2023Review
- Signatures of kin selection in a natural population of the bacteriaEvolution letters · 2023Article
- The evolution of manipulative cheating.eLife · 2022Article
- Kin selection for cooperation in natural bacterial populations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Ten recent insights for our understanding of cooperation.Nature ecology & evolution · 2021Review
- Article
- Microbiome definition re-visited: old concepts and new challenges.Microbiome · 2020Article
- WildEcology and evolution · 2020Article
- Variation at an adhesin locus suggests sociality in natural populations of the yeastProceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Conditional expression explains molecular evolution of social genes in a microbe.Nature communications · 2019Article
- What life is for: a commentary on Fromhage and Jennions.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Discrimination Experiments in Entamoeba and Evidence from Other Protists Suggest Pathogenic Amebas Cooperate with Kin to Colonize Hosts and Deter Rivals.The Journal of eukaryotic microbiology · 2019Review
- Pleiotropy, cooperation, and the social evolution of genetic architecture.PLoS biology · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Many microbes engage in social interactions. Some of these have come to play an important role in the study of cooperation and conflict, largely because, unlike most animals, they can be genetically manipulated and experimentally evolved. However, whereas animal social behavior can be observed and assessed in natural environments, microbes usually cannot, so we know little about microbial social adaptations in nature. This has led to some difficult-to-resolve controversies about social adaptation even for well-studied traits such as bacterial quorum sensing, siderophore production, and biofilms. Here we use molecular signatures of population genetics and molecular evolution to address controversies over the existence of altruism and cheating in social amoebas. First, we find signatures of rapid adaptive molecular evolution that are consistent with social conflict being a significant force in nature. Second, we find population-genetic signatures of purifying selection to support the hypothesis that the cells that form the sterile stalk evolve primarily through altruistic kin selection rather than through selfish direct reproduction. Our results show how molecular signatures can provide insight into social adaptations that cannot be observed in their natural context, and they support the hypotheses that social amoebas in the wild are both altruists and cheaters.
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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.