Publication Date:
2008-08-23
Description:
In many biological examples of cooperation, individuals that cooperate cannot benefit from the resulting public good. This is especially clear in cases of self-destructive cooperation, where individuals die when helping others. If self-destructive cooperation is genetically encoded, these genes can only be maintained if they are expressed by just a fraction of their carriers, whereas the other fraction benefits from the public good. One mechanism that can mediate this differentiation into two phenotypically different sub-populations is phenotypic noise. Here we show that noisy expression of self-destructive cooperation can evolve if individuals that have a higher probability for self-destruction have, on average, access to larger public goods. This situation, which we refer to as assortment, can arise if the environment is spatially structured. These results provide a new perspective on the significance of phenotypic noise in bacterial pathogenesis: it might promote the formation of cooperative sub-populations that die while preparing the ground for a successful infection. We show experimentally that this model captures essential features of Salmonella typhimurium pathogenesis. We conclude that noisily expressed self-destructive cooperative actions can evolve under conditions of assortment, that self-destructive cooperation is a plausible biological function of phenotypic noise, and that self-destructive cooperation mediated by phenotypic noise could be important in bacterial pathogenesis.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Ackermann, Martin -- Stecher, Barbel -- Freed, Nikki E -- Songhet, Pascal -- Hardt, Wolf-Dietrich -- Doebeli, Michael -- England -- Nature. 2008 Aug 21;454(7207):987-90. doi: 10.1038/nature07067.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Institute of Integrative Biology, ETH Zurich, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland. martin.ackermann@env.ethz.ch〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18719588" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Animals
;
Biological Evolution
;
Cooperative Behavior
;
Disease Models, Animal
;
Enterocolitis/microbiology
;
Mice
;
*Models, Biological
;
Phenotype
;
Salmonella Infections/*microbiology
;
Salmonella typhimurium/*pathogenicity/*physiology
;
Stochastic Processes
;
Virulence Factors/physiology
Print ISSN:
0028-0836
Electronic ISSN:
1476-4687
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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