ArticleNature ecology & evolution2023
The evolution of short- and long-range weapons for bacterial competition.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 45 papers.
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Who cites it
45 citing papers in PubMed.
- Microbiome ecology and antibiotic treatment failure: resistance spread, microbial competition and community engineering.Microbial genomics · 2026Review
- Biosurfactants direct the evolutionary dynamics of surface-associated microbial systems.Science advances · 2026Article
- Bacterial weaponry and the ecological factors of competitive success.Essays in biochemistry · 2026Review
- Implications of proteome allocation constraints for understanding interbacterial antagonism.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2026Review
- Surfactin-like lipopeptides contribute to interference competition of Bacillus velezensis against the marine Flavobacteriaceae in phycosphere.Environmental microbiome · 2026Article
- Global identification of Chromobacterium violaceum T6SS effectors reveals an Rhs antibacterial toxin featuring FIX and ADP-ribosyltransferase domains.The Journal of biological chemistry · 2026Article
- Minding the gap: collective determinants of multiscale structure across interacting bacterial colonies.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- The type VI secretion system and associated effector proteins.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2026Review
- Influence of cell-cell distance on the ecology and evolution of microbial communities.The ISME journal · 2026Review
- Virulent strains of Pseudomonas aeruginosa are more disruptive during invasion of a microbial model community.FEMS microbiology letters · 2026Article
- Spatial structure: shaping the ecology and evolution of microbial communities.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2026Review
- Beyond kin killing:ISME communications · 2026Article
- Genomic diversification and tailocin-mediated competition in animal-associatedISME communications · 2026Article
- Emergent collective alignment gives competitive advantage to longer cells during range expansion.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Strain displacement in microbiomes via ecological competition.Nature microbiology · 2025Article
- Exploring Bacterial Interactions Under the Stress Gradient Hypothesis in Response to Selenium Stress.Environmental microbiology reports · 2025Review
- One Earth-One Health to Combat Antimicrobial Resistance Having a Dual Mutation Pattern, Based on the Robust Self-Regulation and Perpetual Reconstruction of Ecosystems.Antibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Functional replacement of ancestral antibacterial secretion system in a bacterial plant pathogen.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Stress-driven temporal production of phage tail-like particles (tailocins) in Dickeya dadantii strain 3937.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Overcoming toxicity: How nonantagonistic microbes manage to thrive in boom-and-bust environments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Bacteria possess a diverse range of mechanisms for inhibiting competitors, including bacteriocins, tailocins, type VI secretion systems and contact-dependent inhibition (CDI). Why bacteria have evolved such a wide array of weapon systems remains a mystery. Here we develop an agent-based model to compare short-range weapons that require cell-cell contact, with long-range weapons that rely on diffusion. Our model predicts that contact weapons are useful when an attacking strain is outnumbered, facilitating invasion and establishment. By contrast, ranged weapons tend to be effective only when attackers are abundant. We test our predictions with the opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which naturally carries multiple weapons, including CDI and diffusing tailocins. As predicted, short-range CDI can function at low and high frequencies, while long-range tailocins require high frequency and cell density to function effectively. Head-to-head competition experiments with the two weapon types further support our predictions: a tailocin attacker defeats CDI only when it is numerically dominant, but then we find it can be devastating. Finally, we show that the two weapons work well together when one strain employs both. We conclude that short- and long-range weapons serve different functions and allow bacteria to fight both as individuals and as a group.
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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.