Adaptation to public goods cheats in Pseudomonas aeruginosa
dc.contributor.author | O'Brien, S | |
dc.contributor.author | Lujan, A | |
dc.contributor.author | Paterson, S | |
dc.contributor.author | Cant, M | |
dc.contributor.author | Buckling, A | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2017-07-20T08:16:08Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2017-07-26 | |
dc.description.abstract | Cooperation in nature is ubiquitous, but is susceptible to social cheats who pay little or no cost of cooperation yet reap the benefits. The effect such cheats have on reducing population productivity suggests that there is selection for cooperators to mitigate the adverse effects of cheats. While mechanisms have been elucidated for scenarios involving a direct association between producer and cooperative product, it is less clear how cooperators may suppress cheating in an anonymous public goods scenario, where cheats cannot be directly identified. Here, we investigate the real-time evolutionary response of cooperators to cheats when cooperation is mediated by a diffusible public good: the production of iron-scavenging siderophores by Pseudomonas aeruginosa. We find that siderophore producers evolved in thepresence of a high frequency of non-producing cheats were fitter in the presence of cheats, at no obvious cost to population productivity. A novel morphotype independently evolved and reached higher frequencies in cheat-adapted versus control populations, exhibiting reduced siderophore production but increased production of pyocyanin - an extracellular toxin that can also increase the availability of soluble iron. This suggests that cooperators may have mitigated the negative effects of cheats by downregulating siderophore production and upregulating an alternative iron-acquisition public good. More generally, the study emphasises that cooperating organisms can rapidly adapt to the presence of anonymous cheats without necessarily incurring fitness costs in the environment they evolve in. | en_GB |
dc.description.sponsorship | The work was funded by AXA research fund, NERC, BBSRC and the Royal Society to AB and a University of Exeter PhD studentship to SOB. | en_GB |
dc.identifier.citation | Vol. 284 (1859), article 20171089 | en_GB |
dc.identifier.doi | 10.1098/rspb.2017.1089 | |
dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10871/28534 | |
dc.language.iso | en | en_GB |
dc.publisher | Royal Society | en_GB |
dc.rights | © 2017 The Authors. Open access. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. | |
dc.title | Adaptation to public goods cheats in Pseudomonas aeruginosa | en_GB |
dc.type | Article | en_GB |
dc.identifier.issn | 0962-8452 | |
dc.description | This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the Royal Society via the DOI in this record. | en_GB |
dc.identifier.eissn | 1471-2954 | |
dc.identifier.journal | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences | en_GB |
dc.rights.uri | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
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Except where otherwise noted, this item's licence is described as © 2017 The Authors. Open access. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.