10.5061/DRYAD.77HK7
Amherd, Michaela
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich
Velicer, Gregory J.
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich
Rendueles, Olaya
Institut Pasteur
French National Centre for Scientific Research
Data from: Spontaneous nongenetic variation of group size creates
cheater-free groups of social microbes
Dryad
dataset
2017
multicellular development
bet-hedging
Natural Variation
phenotypic heterogeneity
National Science Foundation
https://ror.org/021nxhr62
EMBO Long-Term Fellowship Programme.
2017-12-05T15:30:31Z
2017-12-05T15:30:31Z
en
https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/arx184
14183 bytes
1
CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication
In social organisms, cheaters that gain a fitness advantage by defecting
from the costs of cooperation reduce the average level of cooperation in a
population. Such “cheating load” can be severe enough to cause local
extinction events when cooperation is necessary for survival, but can also
mediate group-level selection against cheaters across spatially structured
groups that vary in cheater frequency. In cheater-laden populations, such
variation could be generated by the formation of new homogeneous groups by
small numbers of identical cells. Here we use the model social bacterium
Myxococcus xanthus to test whether population bottlenecks inherent to the
starvation-induced formation of multicellular fruiting bodies can generate
cheater-free groups within an initially cheater-laden population. We first
show that genetically identical fruiting bodies vary greatly in their
numbers of stress-resistant spores. We further show mathematically and
experimentally that this variation can include small cheater-free groups.
Such non-genetic variation in group size was found to occur in a variety
of M. xanthus isolates and Myxococcus species. Our results suggest that
stress-induced reductions in group size may serve as a general process
that repeatedly purges genetic diversity from a minority of social groups,
thus recurrently generating high-relatedness social environments
unburdened by cheating load.
Figure1Number of spores per individual fruiting body (column 2) across
eight independent replicates (column 1: T1 to T8).Number of spores
produced per natural isolateThis table contains the name of the isolate
(column 1) and the number of spores in individual fruiting bodies across
four indented replicates (columns 2 to 6: T1 to
T4).Spores_naturalIsolates.csvNumber of cooperator and cheater per
fruiting bodyNumber of spores belonging to cooperator genotype (column 4:
GJV1) and cheater genotype(column 3:OC) per fruiting body (column 2: FB)
and per independent experiment (column 1: Exp). Log values for cooperator
and cheater are also presented (Log.GJV1 and Log.OC
respectively)Cooperator_cheater.csvNumber of spores across different
environmentsNumber of spores in each individual fruiting body (column 4:
Logspores) per strain (column 2: Strain) in each environment(column 3:
Env) per experiment (column 1: Exp)Figure5.csv