Frequency Dependence and Cooperation: Theory and a Test with Bacteria

Ross‐Gillespie, Adin; Gardner, Thomas A.; West, Michael; Griffin,

doi:10.2307/4541098

Cited by 76 publications

(149 citation statements)

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“…For example, (a) at lower population density, cells will be less able to use the public goods produced by other cells and so cheats will do worse (Brown & Johnstone 2001, Greig & Travisano 2004, (b) cheats do better when they are at lower frequencies in the population (frequency dependence) because they are then better able to exploit cooperators (Dugatkin et al 2003(Dugatkin et al , 2005Harrison et al 2006;Ross-Gillespie et al 2007;Velicer et al 2000), (c) individuals would be expected to change their production of public goods depending upon the availability of resources in the environment, which will also be influenced by the behavior of their neighbors, and (d ) competition between relatives reduces the kin-selected benefit of cooperation and hence favors reduced levels of cooperation (Griffin et al 2004). The work in these areas stresses the importance of developing specific theory that can be tested with specific systems (Ross-Gillespie et al 2007).…”

Section: β-Lactamasementioning

confidence: 98%

The Social Lives of Microbes

West

Diggle

Buckling

et al. 2007

Annu. Rev. Ecol. Evol. Syst.

649

702

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Our understanding of the social lives of microbes has been revolutionized over the past 20 years. It used to be assumed that bacteria and other microorganisms lived relatively independent unicellular lives, without the cooperative behaviors that have provoked so much interest in mammals, birds, and insects. However, a rapidly expanding body of research has completely overturned this idea, showing that microbes indulge in a variety of social behaviors involving complex systems of cooperation, communication, and synchronization. Work in this area has already provided some elegant experimental tests of social evolutionary theory, demonstrating the importance of factors such as relatedness, kin discrimination, competition between relatives, and enforcement of cooperation. Our aim here is to review these social behaviors, emphasizing the unique opportunities they offer for testing existing evolutionary theory as well as highlighting the novel theoretical problems that they pose.

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Section: β-Lactamasementioning

confidence: 98%

The Social Lives of Microbes

West

Diggle

Buckling

et al. 2007

Annu. Rev. Ecol. Evol. Syst.

649

702

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“…Many competitive interactions are frequency dependent, either negatively or positively [12][13][14][15]. Negative frequency dependence (NFD) of fitness has long been recognized to promote diversity when the fitness ranks of competitors reverse at a threshold frequency and rarity confers a fitness advantage [14,[16][17][18][19].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Positively Frequency-Dependent Interference Competition Maintains Diversity and Pervades a Natural Population of Cooperative Microbes

2015

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Positively frequency-dependent selection is predicted from theory to promote diversity in patchily structured populations and communities, but empirical support for this prediction has been lacking. Here, we investigate frequency-dependent selection among isolates from a local natural population of the highly social bacterium Myxococcus xanthus. Upon starvation, closely related cells of M. xanthus cooperate to construct multicellular fruiting bodies, yet recently diverged genotypes co-residing in a local soil population often antagonize one another during fruiting-body development in mixed groups. In the experiments reported here, both fitness per se and strong forms of interference competition exhibit pervasive and strong positive frequency dependence (PFD) among many isolates from a centimeter-scale soil population of M. xanthus. All strains that compete poorly at intermediate frequency are shown to be competitively dominant at high frequency in most genotype pairings during both growth and development, and strongly so. Interference competition is often lethal and appears to be contact dependent rather than mediated by diffusible compounds. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate that positively frequency-dependent selection maintains diversity when genotype frequencies vary patchily in structured populations. These results suggest that PFD contributes to the high levels of local diversity found among M. xanthus social groups in natural soil populations by reinforcing social barriers to cross-territory invasion and thereby also promotes high within-group relatedness. More broadly, our results suggest that potential roles of PFD in maintaining patchily distributed diversity should be investigated more extensively in other species.

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“…The extent to which traits are social is commonly tested by competing mutant strains against wild‐type strains and examining both the extent to which the mutants are able to exploit the wild type and the group level consequences. However, experiments performed to date have utilized mutant phenotypes that either carry large fitness effects, which can lead to complications such as frequency‐dependence (Ross‐Gillespie et al. , 2007), or exhibit pleiotropic effects on other traits (Foster et al.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…, 2006; MacLean & Gudelj, 2006; Diggle et al. , 2007a; Ross‐Gillespie et al. , 2007, 2009; Rumbaugh et al.…”

Section: Introductionunclassified

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Fitness correlates with the extent of cheating in a bacterium

Jiricny

Diggle

West

et al. 2010

J of Evolutionary Biology

112

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There is growing awareness of the importance of cooperative behaviours in microbial communities. Empirical support for this insight comes from experiments using mutant strains, termed ‘cheats’, which exploit the cooperative behaviour of wild‐type strains. However, little detailed work has gone into characterising the competitive dynamics of cooperative and cheating strains. We test three specific predictions about the fitness consequences of cheating to different extents by examining the production of the iron‐scavenging siderophore molecule, pyoverdin, in the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa. We create a collection of mutants that differ in the amount of pyoverdin that they produce (from 1% to 96% of the production of paired wild types) and demonstrate that these production levels correlate with both gene activity and the ability to bind iron. Across these mutants, we found that (1) when grown in a mixed culture with a cooperative wild‐type strain, the relative fitness of a mutant is negatively correlated with the amount of pyoverdin that it produces; (2) the absolute and relative fitness of the wild‐type strain in the mixed culture is positively correlated with the amount of pyoverdin that the mutant produces; and (3) when grown in a monoculture, the absolute fitness of the mutant is positively correlated with the amount of pyoverdin that it produces. Overall, we demonstrate that cooperative pyoverdin production is exploitable and illustrate how variation in a social behaviour determines fitness differently, depending on the social environment.

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Frequency Dependence and Cooperation: Theory and a Test with Bacteria

Cited by 76 publications

References 0 publications

The Social Lives of Microbes

The Social Lives of Microbes

Positively Frequency-Dependent Interference Competition Maintains Diversity and Pervades a Natural Population of Cooperative Microbes

Fitness correlates with the extent of cheating in a bacterium

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