ArticleMolecular systems biology2023
Evolution of genome fragility enables microbial division of labor.
Article in Molecular systems biology, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 12 citations in OpenAlex.
- Spatial structure: shaping the ecology and evolution of microbial communities.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2026Review
- Factors that influence the caste ratio in a bacterial division of labour.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Article
- Light-Based Anti-Biofilm and Antibacterial Strategies.Pharmaceutics · 2023Review
- Evolution of selfish multicellularity: collective organisation of individual spatio-temporal regulatory strategies.BMC ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Evolution of genome fragility enables microbial division of labor.Molecular systems biology · 2023Article
- Modelling the evolution of novelty: a review.Essays in biochemistry · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Division of labor can evolve when social groups benefit from the functional specialization of its members. Recently, a novel means of coordinating the division of labor was found in the antibiotic-producing bacterium Streptomyces coelicolor, where specialized cells are generated through large-scale genomic re-organization. We investigate how the evolution of a genome architecture enables such mutation-driven division of labor, using a multiscale computational model of bacterial evolution. In this model, bacterial behavior-antibiotic production or replication-is determined by the structure and composition of their genome, which encodes antibiotics, growth-promoting genes, and fragile genomic loci that can induce chromosomal deletions. We find that a genomic organization evolves, which partitions growth-promoting genes and antibiotic-coding genes into distinct parts of the genome, separated by fragile genomic loci. Mutations caused by these fragile sites mostly delete growth-promoting genes, generating sterile, and antibiotic-producing mutants from weakly-producing progenitors, in agreement with experimental observations. This division of labor enhances the competition between colonies by promoting antibiotic diversity. These results show that genomic organization can co-evolve with genomic instabilities to enable reproductive division of labor.
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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.