Rapid and Widespread De Novo Evolution of Kin Discrimination
Rapid and widespread de novo evolution of kin discrimination Olaya Renduelesa,1, Peter C. Zeeb,c, Iris Dinkelackerd, Michaela Amherda, Sébastien Wielgossa, and Gregory J. Velicera,b,d aInstitute for Integrative Biology, ETH Zürich, 8092 Zürich, Switzerland; bDepartment of Biology, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405; cDepartment of Biology, California State University-Northridge, Northridge, CA 91330; and dDepartment of Evolutionary Biology, Max-Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, 72076 Tübingen, Germany Edited by Richard E. Lenski, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, and approved June 1, 2015 (received for review February 3, 2015) Diverse forms of kin discrimination, broadly defined as alteration that formed between distinct nonmerging colonies of the bacterium of social behavior as a function of genetic relatedness among Proteus mirabilis (21) and has since been found in several other interactants, are common among social organisms from microbes species (20, 22). For example, a large number of such colony- to humans. However, the evolutionary origins and causes of kin- merger incompatibilities evolved among closely related genotypes of discriminatory behavior remain largely obscure. One form of kin the cooperative bacterium Myxococcus xanthus in a natural centi- discrimination observed in microbes is the failure of genetically meter-scale population (20). Irrespective of their original evolu- distinct colonies to merge freely upon encounter. Here, we first use tionary cause(s), the emergence of colony-merger incompatibilities natural isolates of the highly social bacterium Myxococcus xanthus to in nature is likely to have profound implications for the distribution show that colony-merger incompatibilities can be strong barriers to of social interactions among genotypes during cooperative pro- social interaction, particularly by reducing chimerism in multicellular cesses.
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