ArticleThe ISME journal2021
Quorum sensing provides a molecular mechanism for evolution to tune and maintain investment in cooperation.
Article in The ISME journal, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 15 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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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.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 35 citations in OpenAlex.
- Principles for Rigorous Design and Application of Synthetic Microbial Communities.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Pooled it
- Low initial metabolite production enhances stability in syntrophic bacterial consortia.Communications biology · 2026Article
- The sleeping bacterium: shedding light on the resuscitation mechanism.European biophysics journal : EBJ · 2026Article
- The Fungi-Bacteria Interaction Mechanism of Microbial Consortium During Efficient Lignin Degradation Based on Metabolomics Analysis.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Modeling bacterial interactions uncovers the importance of outliers in the coastal lignin-degrading consortium.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Time of first contact determines cooperator success in a three-member microbial consortium.ISME communications · 2025Article
- Quorum sensing in Vibrio controls carbon metabolism to optimize growth in changing environmental conditions.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Experimental evolution of yeast shows that public-goods upregulation can evolve despite challenges from exploitative non-producers.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Uncovering the GacS-mediated role in evolutionary progression through trajectory reconstruction in Pseudomonas aeruginosa.Nucleic acids research · 2024Article
- Cooperation in bioluminescence: understanding the role of autoinducers by a stochastic random resistor model.The European physical journal. E, Soft matter · 2023Article
- Disarm The Bacteria: What Temperate Phages Can Do.Current issues in molecular biology · 2023Review
- Emerging Research Topics in the Vibrionaceae and the Squid-Microorganisms · 2022Review
- Cheater suppression and stochastic clearance through quorum sensing.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Kin selection for cooperation in natural bacterial populations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Bottom-up synthetic ecology study of microbial consortia to enhance lignocellulose bioconversion.Biotechnology for biofuels and bioproducts · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
As selection frequently favors noncooperating defectors in mixed populations with cooperators, mechanisms that promote cooperation stability clearly exist. One potential mechanism is bacterial cell-to-cell communication, quorum sensing (QS), which can allow cooperators to prevent invasion by defectors. However, the impact of QS on widespread maintenance of cooperation in well-mixed conditions has not been experimentally demonstrated over extended evolutionary timescales. Here, we use wild-type (WT) Vibrio campbellii that regulates cooperation with QS and an unconditional cooperating (UC) mutant to examine the evolutionary origins and dynamics of novel defectors during a long-term evolution experiment. We found that UC lineages were completely outcompeted by defectors, whereas functioning QS enabled the maintenance of cooperative variants in most WT populations. Sequencing evolved populations revealed multiple luxR mutations that swept the UC lineages. However, the evolution of mutant lineages with reduced levels of bioluminescence (dims) occurred in many WT lineages. These dim variants also decreased other cooperative phenotypes regulated by QS, including protease production, indicating they result from changes to QS regulation. This diminished investment phenotype optimizes a tradeoff between cooperative input and growth output and suggests that decreasing the cost of QS could be a favorable strategy for maintaining the cooperative behaviors it regulates.
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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.