ArticlePLoS biology2018
Pleiotropy, cooperation, and the social evolution of genetic architecture.
Article in PLoS biology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed.
- Rethinking Microbial Chemical Ecology: Secondary Metabolites as Concentration-Dependent Signaling Hubs with Implications for Anti-Virulence Intervention.Microorganisms · 2026Review
- The Evolutionary and Ecological Consequences of Cooperation.The American naturalist · 2026Review
- Co-regulation of cooperative and private traits by PsdR inEvolution letters · 2025Article
- Enhanced metabolic entanglement emerges during the evolution of an interkingdom microbial community.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Uncovering the GacS-mediated role in evolutionary progression through trajectory reconstruction in Pseudomonas aeruginosa.Nucleic acids research · 2024Article
- Open questions in the social lives of viruses.Journal of evolutionary biology · 2023Review
- Cheating leads to the evolution of multipartite viruses.PLoS biology · 2023Article
- Cooperation loci are more pleiotropic than private loci in the bacteriumProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Article
- A personal cost of cheating can stabilize reproductive altruism during the early evolution of clonal multicellularity.Biology letters · 2022Article
- Volatile social environments can favour investments in quality over quantity of social relationships.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Evolution of the Quorum Sensing Regulon in Cooperating Populations of Pseudomonas aeruginosa.mBio · 2022Article
- Article
- The evolution of cheating in viruses.Nature communications · 2021Review
- Ten recent insights for our understanding of cooperation.Nature ecology & evolution · 2021Review
- Quorum sensing provides a molecular mechanism for evolution to tune and maintain investment in cooperation.The ISME journal · 2021Article
- Article
- Hidden paths to endless forms most wonderful: Complexity of bacterial motility shapes diversification of latent phenotypes.BMC evolutionary biology · 2020Article
- Reproduction and signals regulating worker policing under identical hormonal control in social wasps.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Exploitation of the Cooperative Behaviors of Anti-CRISPR Phages.Cell host & microbe · 2020Article
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3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Pleiotropy has been suggested as a novel mechanism for stabilising cooperation in bacteria and other microbes. The hypothesis is that linking cooperation with a trait that provides a personal (private) benefit can outweigh the cost of cooperation in situations when cooperation would not be favoured by mechanisms such as kin selection. We analysed the theoretical plausibility of this hypothesis, with analytical models and individual-based simulations. We found that (1) pleiotropy does not stabilise cooperation, unless the cooperative and private traits are linked via a genetic architecture that cannot evolve (mutational constraint); (2) if the genetic architecture is constrained in this way, then pleiotropy favours any type of trait and not especially cooperation; (3) if the genetic architecture can evolve, then pleiotropy does not favour cooperation; and (4) there are several alternative explanations for why traits may be linked, and causality can even be predicted in the opposite direction, with cooperation favouring pleiotropy. Our results suggest that pleiotropy could only explain cooperation under restrictive conditions and instead show how social evolution can shape the genetic architecture.
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