ArticleEcology and evolution2021
Relatedness and the evolution of mechanisms to divide labor in microorganisms.
Article in Ecology and evolution, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
What it found
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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.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 20 citations in OpenAlex.
- Larger colony sizes favour greater division of labour between queens and workers in ants.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2026Article
- Division of labour in colony defence in a clonal ant.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Evolution of irreversible differentiation under stage-dependent cell differentiation.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Article
- Larger colony sizes favoured the evolution of more worker castes in ants.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- The evolution of autonomy from two cooperative specialists in fluctuating environments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Programming Dynamic Division of Labor Using Horizontal Gene Transfer.ACS synthetic biology · 2024Article
- Signatures of kin selection in a natural population of the bacteriaEvolution letters · 2023Article
- The evolution of manipulative cheating.eLife · 2022Article
- The evolution of mechanisms to produce phenotypic heterogeneity in microorganisms.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Losing out to improve group fitness.eLife · 2021Article
- Relatedness and the evolution of mechanisms to divide labor in microorganisms.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Division of labor occurs when cooperating individuals specialize to perform different tasks. In bacteria and other microorganisms, some species divide labor by random specialization, where an individual's role is determined by random fluctuations in biochemical reactions within the cell. Other species divide labor by coordinating across individuals to determine which cells will perform which task, using mechanisms such as between-cell signaling. However, previous theory, examining the evolution of mechanisms to divide labor between reproductives and sterile helpers, has only considered clonal populations, where there is no potential for conflict between individuals. We used a mixture of analytical and simulation models to examine nonclonal populations and found that: (a) intermediate levels of coordination can be favored, between the extreme of no coordination (random) and full coordination; (b) as relatedness decreases, coordinated division of labor is less likely to be favored. Our results can help explain why coordinated division of labor is relatively rare in bacteria, where groups may frequently be nonclonal.
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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.