Host population bottlenecks drive parasite extinction during antagonistic coevolution.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Hesse E
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4736460 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jan
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
Host population bottlenecks drive parasite extinction during antagonistic coevolution.
Evolution; international journal of organic evolution 20151230 1
Host-parasite interactions are often characterized by large fluctuations in host population size, and we investigated how such host bottlenecks affected coevolution between a bacterium and a virus. Previous theory suggests that host bottlenecks should provide parasites with an evolutionary advantage, but instead we found that phages were rapidly driven to extinction when coevolving with hosts exposed to large genetic bottlenecks. This was caused by the stochastic loss of sensitive bacteria, whic ...[more]
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