ArticleNature communications2022
Obligate mutualistic cooperation limits evolvability.
Article in Nature communications, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 22 citations in OpenAlex.
- Stress-Driven Accelerated Evolution and Ecological Network Reconfiguration in Extremophilic Microbial Communities.Biology · 2026Review
- Differences in the fitness effects of traded resources shape traits and persistence in multi-mutualist communities.PloS one · 2026Article
- Ecology of the gut microbiota and colonization resistance: mechanisms and therapeutic implications.FEMS microbiology ecology · 2025Review
- Strengthen or Weaken: Evolutionary Directions of Cross-Feeding After Formation.Environmental microbiology reports · 2025Review
- Mutualism breakdown underpins evolutionary rescue in an obligate cross-feeding bacterial consortium.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Reconciling ecology and evolutionary game theory or "When not to think cooperation".Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- An ecological and stochastic perspective on persisters resuscitation.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2025Article
- 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
- Article
- Empirical evidence for metabolic drift in plant and algal lipid biosynthesis pathways.Frontiers in plant science · 2024Review
- Community interactions drive the evolution of antibiotic tolerance in bacteria.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Eco-evolutionary modelling of microbial syntrophy indicates the robustness of cross-feeding over cross-facilitation.Scientific reports · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cooperative mutualisms are widespread and play fundamental roles in many ecosystems. Given that these interactions are often obligate, the Darwinian fitness of the participating individuals is not only determined by the information encoded in their own genomes, but also the traits and capabilities of their corresponding interaction partners. Thus, a major outstanding question is how obligate cooperative mutualisms affect the ability of organisms to adapt evolutionarily to changing environmental conditions. Here we address this issue using a mutualistic cooperation between two auxotrophic genotypes of Escherichia coli that reciprocally exchanged costly amino acids. Amino acid-supplemented monocultures and unsupplemented cocultures were exposed to stepwise increasing concentrations of different antibiotics. This selection experiment reveals that metabolically interdependent bacteria are generally less able to adapt to environmental stress than autonomously growing strains. Moreover, obligate cooperative mutualists frequently regain metabolic autonomy, resulting in a collapse of the mutualistic interaction. Together, our results identify a limited evolvability as a significant evolutionary cost that individuals have to pay when entering into an obligate mutualistic cooperation.
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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.