ArticlePLoS biology2020
Eco-evolutionary significance of "loners".
Article in PLoS biology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 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
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Reconciling ecology and evolutionary game theory or "When not to think cooperation".Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Adaptive evolutionary trajectories in complexity: Transitions between unicellularity and facultative differentiated multicellularity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Unravelling a diversity of cellular structures and aggregation dynamics during the early development ofBiology letters · 2024Article
- The greenbeard gene tgrB1 regulates altruism and cheating in Dictyostelium discoideum.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Article
- Structured foraging of soil predators unveils functional responses to bacterial defenses.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Shifts in evolutionary balance of phenotypes under environmental changes.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Article
- Developmental constraints enforce altruism and avert the tragedy of the commons in a social microbe.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Collective behaviours in organoids.Current opinion in cell biology · 2021Review
- Mistakes can stabilise the dynamics of rock-paper-scissors games.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- The consequences of switching strategies in a two-player iterated survival game.Journal of mathematical biology · 2021Article
- Aggregative cycles evolve as a solution to conflicts in social investment.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Eco-evolutionary significance of "loners".PLoS biology · 2020Article
- Spatial eco-evolutionary feedbacks mediate coexistence in prey-predator systems.Scientific reports · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Loners-individuals out of sync with a coordinated majority-occur frequently in nature. Are loners incidental byproducts of large-scale coordination attempts, or are they part of a mosaic of life-history strategies? Here, we provide empirical evidence of naturally occurring heritable variation in loner behavior in the model social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum. We propose that Dictyostelium loners-cells that do not join the multicellular life stage-arise from a dynamic population-partitioning process, the result of each cell making a stochastic, signal-based decision. We find evidence that this imperfectly synchronized multicellular development is affected by both abiotic (environmental porosity) and biotic (signaling) factors. Finally, we predict theoretically that when a pair of strains differing in their partitioning behavior coaggregate, cross-signaling impacts slime-mold diversity across spatiotemporal scales. Our findings suggest that loners could be critical to understanding collective and social behaviors, multicellular development, and ecological dynamics in D. discoideum. More broadly, across taxa, imperfect coordination of collective behaviors might be adaptive by enabling diversification of life-history strategies.
Indexed as
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.