Bacterial Quorum Sensing Stabilizes Cooperation by Optimizing Growth Strategies

Overview

Journal Appl Environ Microbiol

Specialties Environmental Health
Microbiology

Date 2016 Aug 28

PMID 27565619

Citations 16

Authors

Eric L Bruger

Christopher M Waters

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Importance: Cooperation is a fundamental problem for evolutionary biology to explain. Conditional participation through phenotypic plasticity driven by communication is a potential solution to this dilemma. Thus, among bacteria, QS has been proposed to be a proximate stabilizing mechanism for cooperative behaviors. Here, we empirically demonstrate that QS in V. harveyi prevents cheating and subsequent invasion by nonproducing defectors by maximizing the growth rate at low cell densities and the growth yield at high cell densities, whereas an unconditional cooperator is rapidly driven to extinction by defectors. Our findings provide experimental evidence that QS regulation prevents the invasion of cooperative populations by QS defectors even under unstructured conditions, and they strongly support the role of communication in bacteria as a mechanism that stabilizes cooperative traits.

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