ArticleNature ecology & evolution2019
Privatization of public goods can cause population decline.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Thiamine cross-feeding drives microbial coexistence in the leaf microbiome.Nature microbiology · 2026Article
- Strengthen or Weaken: Evolutionary Directions of Cross-Feeding After Formation.Environmental microbiology reports · 2025Review
- Experimental evolution of yeast shows that public-goods upregulation can evolve despite challenges from exploitative non-producers.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Genetic evidence for algal auxin production iniScience · 2024Article
- Metabolic efficiency reshapes the seminal relationship between pathogen growth rate and virulence.Ecology letters · 2023Article
- How public can public goods be? Environmental context shapes the evolutionary ecology of partially private goods.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- A Salvaging Strategy Enables Stable Metabolite Provisioning among Free-Living Bacteria.mSystems · 2022Article
- On the Ecological Significance of Phenotypic Heterogeneity in Microbial Populations Undergoing Starvation.Microbiology spectrum · 2022Article
- Predicting microbial growth dynamics in response to nutrient availability.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Microbes commonly deploy a risky strategy to acquire nutrients from their environment, involving the production of costly public goods that can be exploited by neighbouring individuals. Why engage in such a strategy when an exploitation-free alternative is readily available whereby public goods are kept private? We address this by examining metabolism of Saccharomyces cerevisiae in its native form and by creating a new three-strain synthetic community deploying different strategies of sucrose metabolism. Public-metabolizers digest resources externally, private-metabolizers internalize resources before digestion, and cheats avoid the metabolic costs of digestion but exploit external products generated by competitors. A combination of mathematical modelling and ecological experiments reveal that private-metabolizers invade and take over an otherwise stable community of public-metabolizers and cheats. However, owing to the reduced growth rate of private-metabolizers and population bottlenecks that are frequently associated with microbial communities, privatizing public goods can become unsustainable, leading to population decline.
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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.