ArticleCurrent biology : CB2020
The Evolution of Mass Cell Suicide in Bacterial Warfare.
Article in Current biology : CB, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed, 49 citations in OpenAlex.
- Bacterial weaponry and the ecological factors of competitive success.Essays in biochemistry · 2026Review
- Implications of proteome allocation constraints for understanding interbacterial antagonism.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2026Review
- The interplay between the marine diazotrophApplied and environmental microbiology · 2026Article
- Strain displacement in microbiomes via ecological competition.Nature microbiology · 2025Article
- Type VI secretion system activity at lethal antibiotic concentrations leads to overestimation of weapon potency.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2025Article
- High-Resolution Patterned Delivery of Chemical Signals From 3D-Printed Picoliter Droplet Networks.Advanced materials (Deerfield Beach, Fla.) · 2025Article
- Microsporidian coinfection reduces fitness of a fungal pathogen due to rapid host mortality.mBio · 2024Article
- Microfluidic approaches in microbial ecology.Lab on a chip · 2024Review
- Inactivation of antibiotic-resistant bacteriaFrontiers in microbiology · 2024Article
- Pantailocins: phage-derived bacteriocins fromApplied and environmental microbiology · 2023Article
- Tracking bacteria at high density with FAST, the Feature-Assisted Segmenter/Tracker.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Pleiotropic hubs drive bacterial surface competition through parallel changes in colony composition and expansion.PLoS biology · 2023Article
- Bacterial defences: mechanisms, evolution and antimicrobial resistance.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2023Review
- Collective protection against the type VI secretion system in bacteria.The ISME journal · 2023Article
- Proliferating active matter.Nature reviews. Physics · 2023Review
- Evolutionary and ecological role of extracellular contractile injection systems: from threat to weapon.Frontiers in microbiology · 2023Review
- Suicidal chemotaxis in bacteria.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Calibrating spatiotemporal models of microbial communities to microscopy data: A review.PLoS computational biology · 2022Review
- A Noninvasive Method for Time-Lapse Imaging of Microbial Interactions and Colony Dynamics.Microbiology spectrum · 2022Article
- Modeling endonuclease colicin-like bacteriocin operons as 'genetic arms' in plasmid-genome conflicts.Molecular genetics and genomics : MGG · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Behaviors that cause the death of an actor are typically strongly disfavored by natural selection, and yet many bacteria undergo cell lysis to release anti-competitor toxins [1-5]. This behavior is most easily explained if only a small proportion of cells die to release toxins and help their clonemates, but the frequency of cells that actually lyse during bacterial warfare is unknown. The challenge is finding a way to distinguish cells that have undergone programmed suicide from those that were simply killed by a competitor's toxin. We developed a two-color fluorescence reporter assay in Escherichia coli to overcome this problem. This revealed conditions where nearly all cells undergo programmed lysis. Specifically, adding a DNA-damaging toxin (DNase colicin) from another strain induced mass cell suicide where ∼85% of cells lysed to release their own toxins. Time-lapse 3D confocal microscopy showed that self-lysis occurs locally at even higher frequencies (∼94%) at the interface between toxin-producing colonies. By exposing E. coli that do not perform lysis to the DNase colicin, we found that mass lysis occurs when cells are going to die anyway from toxin exposure. From an evolutionary perspective, this renders the behavior cost-free as these cells have zero reproductive potential. This helps to explain how mass cell suicide can evolve, as any small benefit to surviving clonemates can lead to this retaliatory strategy being favored by natural selection. Our findings have parallels to the suicidal attacks of social insects [6-9], which are also performed by individuals with low reproductive potential.
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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.