Eco-evolutionary dynamics of nested Darwinian populations and the emergence of community-level heredity

Guilhem Doulcier*, Amaury Lambert, Silvia De Monte, Paul B. Rainey

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

43 Citations (Scopus)
23 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Interactions among microbial cells can generate new chemistries and functions, but exploitation requires establishment of communities that reliably recapitulate community-level phenotypes. Using mechanistic mathematical models, we show how simple manipulations to population structure can exogenously impose Darwinian-like properties on communities. Such scaffolding causes communities to participate directly in the process of evolution by natural selection and drives the evolution of cell-level interactions to the point where, despite underlying stochasticity, derived communities give rise to offspring communities that faithfully re-establish parental phenotype. The mechanism is akin to a developmental process (developmental correction) that arises from density-dependent interactions among cells. Knowledge of ecological factors affecting evolution of developmental correction has implications for understanding the evolutionary origin of major egalitarian transitions, symbioses, and for top-down engineering of microbial communities.
Original languageEnglish
Article numbere53433
Pages (from-to)1-39
Number of pages39
JournaleLife
Volume9
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 7 Jul 2020
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

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