ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Molecular causes of an evolutionary shift along the parasitism-mutualism continuum in a bacterial symbiont.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 22 citations in OpenAlex.
- Beyond Symbiosis: The Mind-Bending Role of Microbiomes in Host-Parasite Interactions.Molecular ecology · 2026Article
- Mutualism in disguise: A mosquito parasite with mixed transmission mode displays mutualistic traits promoting oogenesis.PLoS pathogens · 2026Article
- Mycobiota and Antifungal Antibodies as Emerging Targets for the Diagnosis and Prognosis of Human Diseases.Journal of fungi (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Addictive manipulation: a perspective on the role of reproductive parasitism in the evolution of bacteria-eukaryote symbioses.Biology letters · 2024Review
- Facultative symbiont virulence determines horizontal transmission rate without host specificity inEvolution letters · 2024Article
- Genome Dynamics and Temperature Adaptation During Experimental Evolution of Obligate Intracellular Bacteria.Genome biology and evolution · 2023Article
- Facultative symbiont virulence determines horizontal transmission rate without host strain specificity.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Comparative transcriptomics of aphid species that diverged > 22 MYA reveals genes that are important for the maintenance of their symbiosis.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Structural modification of theMicrobiology (Reading, England) · 2023Article
- How It All Begins: Bacterial Factors Mediating the Colonization of Invertebrate Hosts by Beneficial Symbionts.Microbiology and molecular biology reviews : MMBR · 2022Review
- Microbial evolution and transitions along the parasite-mutualist continuum.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
12 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Symbiosis with microbes is a ubiquitous phenomenon with a massive impact on all living organisms, shaping the world around us today. Theoretical and experimental studies show that vertical transmission of symbionts leads to the evolution of mutualistic traits, whereas horizontal transmission facilitates the emergence of parasitic features. However, these studies focused on phenotypic data, and we know little about underlying molecular changes at the genomic level. Here, we combined an experimental evolution approach with infection assays, genome resequencing, and global gene expression analysis to study the effect of transmission mode on an obligate intracellular bacterial symbiont. We show that a dramatic shift in the frequency of genetic variants, coupled with major changes in gene expression, allow the symbiont to alter its position in the parasitism-mutualism continuum depending on the mode of between-host transmission. We found that increased parasitism in horizontally transmitted chlamydiae residing in amoebae was a result of processes occurring at the infectious stage of the symbiont's developmental cycle. Specifically, genes involved in energy production required for extracellular survival and the type III secretion system-the symbiont's primary virulence mechanism-were significantly up-regulated. Our results identify the genomic and transcriptional dynamics sufficient to favor parasitic or mutualistic strategies.
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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.