ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Kin selection explains the evolution of cooperation in the gut microbiota.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 31 papers.
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Who cites it
31 citing papers in PubMed, 47 citations in OpenAlex.
- The protease code of the bacterial gut microbiota: ecological regulation, barrier disruption, and rewiring host defense and signaling.Gut microbes · 2026Review
- Cooperation and the evolution of bacterial niche breadth.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Integrating the Microbiome Into Infection Ecology and Evolution in Wild Animals.Molecular ecology · 2026Review
- Exploring cooperation among social pathogens: a computational perspective.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2026Review
- Molecular Mechanisms of the Microbiota-Gut-Brain Axis in the Onset and Progression of Stroke.International journal of molecular sciences · 2025Review
- Systematic pairwise co-cultures uncover predominant negative interactions among human gut bacteria.Microbiome · 2025Article
- Can Unicellular Organisms Sequester a Germline? The Yeast-Germline Hypothesis.BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology · 2025Review
- A phylogenetic approach to comparative genomics.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2025Review
- Bacteria encode post-mortem protein catabolism that enables altruistic nutrient recycling.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Experimental evolution of yeast shows that public-goods upregulation can evolve despite challenges from exploitative non-producers.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Bacterial lifestyle shapes pangenomes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Genes for cooperation are not more likely to be carried by plasmids.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- The social lives of viruses and other mobile genetic elements: a commentary on Leeks et al. 2023.Journal of evolutionary biology · 2023Article
- Signatures of kin selection in a natural population of the bacteriaEvolution letters · 2023Article
- Article
- Midgut Bacterial Microbiota of 12 Fish Species from a Marine Protected Area in the Aegean Sea (Greece).Microbial ecology · 2023Article
- The paradox of cooperation among selfish cancer cells.Evolutionary applications · 2023Review
- Evolutionary implications of host genetic control for engineering beneficial microbiomes.Current opinion in systems biology · 2023Review
- Metabolic cooperation between conspecific genotypic groups contributes to bacterial fitness.ISME communications · 2023Article
- Cross-feeding in the gut microbiome: Ecology and mechanisms.Cell host & microbe · 2023Review
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Through the secretion of "public goods" molecules, microbes cooperatively exploit their habitat. This is known as a major driver of the functioning of microbial communities, including in human disease. Understanding why microbial species cooperate is therefore crucial to achieve successful microbial community management, such as microbiome manipulation. A leading explanation is that of Hamilton's inclusive-fitness framework. A cooperator can indirectly transmit its genes by helping the reproduction of an individual carrying similar genes. Therefore, all else being equal, as relatedness among individuals increases, so should cooperation. However, the predictive power of relatedness, particularly in microbes, is surrounded by controversy. Using phylogenetic comparative analyses across the full diversity of the human gut microbiota and six forms of cooperation, we find that relatedness is predictive of the cooperative gene content evolution in gut-microbe genomes. Hence, relatedness is predictive of cooperation over broad microbial taxonomic levels that encompass variation in other life-history and ecology details. This supports the generality of Hamilton's central insights and the relevance of relatedness as a key parameter of interest to advance microbial predictive and engineering science.
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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.