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Evolution of chemotactic hitchhiking
Author(s) -
Uppal Gurdip,
Hu Weiyi,
Vural Dervis Can
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
journal of evolutionary biology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.289
H-Index - 128
eISSN - 1420-9101
pISSN - 1010-061X
DOI - 10.1111/jeb.13695
Subject(s) - biology , chemostat , cheating , population , exploit , tragedy of the commons , chemotaxis , motility , evolutionary biology , experimental evolution , ecology , bacteria , microbiology and biotechnology , genetics , computer science , commons , demography , computer security , receptor , sociology , gene
Bacteria typically reside in heterogeneous environments with various chemogradients where motile cells can gain an advantage over nonmotile cells. Since motility is energetically costly, cells must optimize their swimming speed and behaviour to maximize their fitness. Here, we investigate how cheating strategies might evolve where slow or nonmotile microbes exploit faster ones by sticking together and hitching a ride. Starting with physical and biological first principles, we computationally study the effects of sticking on the evolution of motility in a controlled chemostat environment. We find that stickiness allows for slow cheaters to dominate when chemoattractants are dispersed at intermediate distances. In this case, slow microbes exploit faster ones until they consume the population, leading to a tragedy of commons. For long races, slow microbes do gain an initial advantage from sticking, but eventually fall behind. Here, fast microbes are more likely to stick to other fast microbes and co‐operate to increase their own population. We therefore conclude that whether the nature of the hitchhiking interaction is parasitic or mutualistic, depends on the chemoattractant distribution.