Browse
Submit Data
Databases
API
Help

Dataset Information

14 Views

0 Connections

0 Citations

0 Reanalyses

0 Downloads

Omics score: 0

An evolutionarily stable strategy to colonize spatially extended habitats.

ABSTRACT: The ability of a species to colonize newly available habitats is crucial to its overall fitness1-3. In general, motility and fast expansion are expected to be beneficial for colonization and hence for the fitness of an organism4-7. Here we apply an evolution protocol to investigate phenotypical requirements for colonizing habitats of different sizes during range expansion by chemotaxing bacteria8. Contrary to the intuitive expectation that faster is better, we show that there is an optimal expansion speed for a given habitat size. Our analysis showed that this effect arises from interactions among pioneering cells at the front of the expanding population, and revealed a simple, evolutionarily stable strategy for colonizing a habitat of a specific size: to expand at a speed given by the product of the growth rate and the habitat size. These results illustrate stability-to-invasion as a powerful principle for the selection of phenotypes in complex ecological processes.

SUBMITTER: Liu W

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6883132 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Json Xml

Publications

An evolutionarily stable strategy to colonize spatially extended habitats.

Liu Weirong W Cremer Jonas J Li Dengjin D Hwa Terence T Liu Chenli C

Nature 20191106 7784

The ability of a species to colonize newly available habitats is crucial to its overall fitness1-3. In general, motility and fast expansion are expected to be beneficial for colonization and hence for the fitness of an organism4-7. Here we apply an evolution protocol to investigate phenotypical requirements for colonizing habitats of different sizes during range expansion by chemotaxing bacteria8. Contrary to the intuitive expectation that faster is better, we sh ...[more]

PMID: 31695198

Similar Datasets

Evolutionary stability of mutualism: interspecific population regulation as an evolutionarily stable strategy.

Project description:Interspecific mutualisms are often vulnerable to instability because low benefit : cost ratios can rapidly lead to extinction or to the conversion of mutualism to parasite-host or predator-prey interactions. We hypothesize that the evolutionary stability of mutualism can depend on how benefits and costs to one mutualist vary with the population density of its partner, and that stability can be maintained if a mutualist can influence demographic rates and regulate the population density of its partner. We test this hypothesis in a model of mutualism with key features of senita cactus (Pachycereus schottii)-senita moth (Upiga virescens) interactions, in which benefits of pollination and costs of larval seed consumption to plant fitness depend on pollinator density. We show that plants can maximize their fitness by allocating resources to the production of excess flowers at the expense of fruit. Fruit abortion resulting from excess flower production reduces pre-adult survival of the pollinating seed-consumer, and maintains its density beneath a threshold that would destabilize the mutualism. Such a strategy of excess flower production and fruit abortion is convergent and evolutionarily stable against invasion by cheater plants that produce few flowers and abort few to no fruit. This novel mechanism of achieving evolutionarily stable mutualism, namely interspecific population regulation, is qualitatively different from other mechanisms invoking partner choice or selective rewards, and may be a general process that helps to preserve mutualistic interactions in nature.

| S-EPMC1691799 | biostudies-literature

Bacteria from diverse habitats colonize and compete in the mouse gut.

Project description:To study how microbes establish themselves in a mammalian gut environment, we colonized germ-free mice with microbial communities from human, zebrafish, and termite guts, human skin and tongue, soil, and estuarine microbial mats. Bacteria from these foreign environments colonized and persisted in the mouse gut; their capacity to metabolize dietary and host carbohydrates and bile acids correlated with colonization success. Cohousing mice harboring these xenomicrobiota or a mouse cecal microbiota, along with germ-free "bystanders," revealed the success of particular bacterial taxa in invading guts with established communities and empty gut habitats. Unanticipated patterns of ecological succession were observed; for example, a soil-derived bacterium dominated even in the presence of bacteria from other gut communities (zebrafish and termite), and human-derived bacteria colonized germ-free bystander mice before mouse-derived organisms. This approach can be generalized to address a variety of mechanistic questions about succession, including succession in the context of microbiota-directed therapeutics.

| S-EPMC4194163 | biostudies-literature

Suppression force-fields and diffuse competition: competition de-escalation is an evolutionarily stable strategy.

Project description:Competition theory is founded on the premise that individuals benefit from harming their competitors, which helps them secure resources and prevent inhibition by neighbours. When multiple individuals compete, however, competition has complex indirect effects that reverberate through competitive neighbourhoods. The consequences of such 'diffuse' competition are poorly understood. For example, competitive effects may dilute as they propagate through a neighbourhood, weakening benefits of neighbour suppression. Another possibility is that competitive effects may rebound on strong competitors, as their inhibitory effects on their neighbours benefit other competitors in the community. Diffuse competition is unintuitive in part because we lack a clear conceptual framework for understanding how individual interactions manifest in communities of multiple competitors. Here, I use mathematical and agent-based models to illustrate that diffuse interactions-as opposed to direct pairwise interactions-are probably the dominant mode of interaction among multiple competitors. Consequently, competitive effects may regularly rebound, incurring fitness costs under certain conditions, especially when kin-kin interactions are common. These models provide a powerful framework for investigating competitive ability and its evolution and produce clear predictions in ecologically realistic scenarios.

| S-EPMC10465192 | biostudies-literature

Multicellularity makes somatic differentiation evolutionarily stable.

Project description:Many multicellular organisms produce two cell lineages: germ cells, whose descendants produce the next generation, and somatic cells, which support, protect, and disperse the germ cells. This germ-soma demarcation has evolved independently in dozens of multicellular taxa but is absent in unicellular species. A common explanation holds that in these organisms, inefficient intercellular nutrient exchange compels the fitness cost of producing nonreproductive somatic cells to outweigh any potential benefits. We propose instead that the absence of unicellular, soma-producing populations reflects their susceptibility to invasion by nondifferentiating mutants that ultimately eradicate the soma-producing lineage. We argue that multicellularity can prevent the victory of such mutants by giving germ cells preferential access to the benefits conferred by somatic cells. The absence of natural unicellular, soma-producing species previously prevented these hypotheses from being directly tested in vivo: to overcome this obstacle, we engineered strains of the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae that differ only in the presence or absence of multicellularity and somatic differentiation, permitting direct comparisons between organisms with different lifestyles. Our strains implement the essential features of irreversible conversion from germ line to soma, reproductive division of labor, and clonal multicellularity while maintaining sufficient generality to permit broad extension of our conclusions. Our somatic cells can provide fitness benefits that exceed the reproductive costs of their production, even in unicellular strains. We find that nondifferentiating mutants overtake unicellular populations but are outcompeted by multicellular, soma-producing strains, suggesting that multicellularity confers evolutionary stability to somatic differentiation.

| S-EPMC4968738 | biostudies-literature

Spatially extended hybrid methods: a review.

Project description:Many biological and physical systems exhibit behaviour at multiple spatial, temporal or population scales. Multiscale processes provide challenges when they are to be simulated using numerical techniques. While coarser methods such as partial differential equations are typically fast to simulate, they lack the individual-level detail that may be required in regions of low concentration or small spatial scale. However, to simulate at such an individual level throughout a domain and in regions where concentrations are high can be computationally expensive. Spatially coupled hybrid methods provide a bridge, allowing for multiple representations of the same species in one spatial domain by partitioning space into distinct modelling subdomains. Over the past 20 years, such hybrid methods have risen to prominence, leading to what is now a very active research area across multiple disciplines including chemistry, physics and mathematics. There are three main motivations for undertaking this review. Firstly, we have collated a large number of spatially extended hybrid methods and presented them in a single coherent document, while comparing and contrasting them, so that anyone who requires a multiscale hybrid method will be able to find the most appropriate one for their need. Secondly, we have provided canonical examples with algorithms and accompanying code, serving to demonstrate how these types of methods work in practice. Finally, we have presented papers that employ these methods on real biological and physical problems, demonstrating their utility. We also consider some open research questions in the area of hybrid method development and the future directions for the field.

| S-EPMC5832735 | biostudies-literature

The evolutionarily stable distribution of fitness effects.

Project description:The distribution of fitness effects (DFE) of new mutations is a key parameter in determining the course of evolution. This fact has motivated extensive efforts to measure the DFE or to predict it from first principles. However, just as the DFE determines the course of evolution, the evolutionary process itself constrains the DFE. Here, we analyze a simple model of genome evolution in a constant environment in which natural selection drives the population toward a dynamic steady state where beneficial and deleterious substitutions balance. The distribution of fitness effects at this steady state is stable under further evolution and provides a natural null expectation for the DFE in a population that has evolved in a constant environment for a long time. We calculate how the shape of the evolutionarily stable DFE depends on the underlying population genetic parameters. We show that, in the absence of epistasis, the ratio of beneficial to deleterious mutations of a given fitness effect obeys a simple relationship independent of population genetic details. Finally, we analyze how the stable DFE changes in the presence of a simple form of diminishing-returns epistasis.

| S-EPMC4423373 | biostudies-literature

A simulator for spatially extended kappa models.

Project description:Spatial Kappa is a simulator of models written in a variant of the rule-based stochastic modelling language Kappa, with spatial extensions.

| S-EPMC3834793 | biostudies-literature

The evolution of bequeathal in stable habitats.

Project description:Adults sometimes disperse, while philopatric offspring inherit the natal site, a pattern known as bequeathal. Despite a decades-old empirical literature, little theoretical work has explored when natural selection may favor bequeathal. We present a simple mathematical model of the evolution of bequeathal in a stable environment, under both global and local dispersal. We find that natural selection favors bequeathal when adults are competitively advantaged over juveniles, baseline mortality is high, the environment is unsaturated, and when juveniles experience high dispersal mortality. However, frequently bequeathal may not evolve, because the fitness cost for the adult is too large relative to inclusive fitness benefits. Additionally, there are many situations for which bequeathal is an ESS, yet cannot invade the population. As bequeathal in real populations appears to be facultative, yet-to-be-modeled factors like timing of birth in the breeding season may strongly influence the patterns seen in natural populations.

| S-EPMC6238137 | biostudies-literature

Rational Design of Evolutionarily Stable Microbial Kill Switches.

Project description:The evolutionary stability of synthetic genetic circuits is key to both the understanding and application of genetic control elements. One useful but challenging situation is a switch between life and death depending on environment. Here are presented "essentializer" and "cryodeath" circuits, which act as kill switches in Escherichia coli. The essentializer element induces cell death upon the loss of a bi-stable cI/Cro memory switch. Cryodeath makes use of a cold-inducible promoter to express a toxin. We employ rational design and a toxin/antitoxin titering approach to produce and screen a small library of potential constructs, in order to select for constructs that are evolutionarily stable. Both kill switches were shown to maintain functionality in vitro for at least 140 generations. Additionally, cryodeath was shown to control the growth environment of a population, with an escape frequency of less than 1 in 105 after 10 days of growth in the mammalian gut.

| S-EPMC5812007 | biostudies-literature

Resilience of alternative states in spatially extended ecosystems.

Project description:Alternative stable states in ecology have been well studied in isolated, well-mixed systems. However, in reality, most ecosystems exist on spatially extended landscapes. Applying existing theory from dynamic systems, we explore how such a spatial setting should be expected to affect ecological resilience. We focus on the effect of local disturbances, defining resilience as the size of the area of a strong local disturbance needed to trigger a shift. We show that in contrast to well-mixed systems, resilience in a homogeneous spatial setting does not decrease gradually as a bifurcation point is approached. Instead, as an environmental driver changes, the present dominant state remains virtually 'indestructible', until at a critical point (the Maxwell point) its resilience drops sharply in the sense that even a very local disturbance can cause a domino effect leading eventually to a landscape-wide shift to the alternative state. Close to this Maxwell point the travelling wave moves very slow. Under these conditions both states have a comparable resilience, allowing long transient co-occurrence of alternative states side-by-side, and also permanent co-existence if there are mild spatial barriers. Overall however, hysteresis may mostly disappear in a spatial context as one of both alternative states will always tend to be dominant. Our results imply that local restoration efforts on a homogeneous landscape will typically either fail or trigger a landscape-wide transition. For extensive biomes with alternative stable states, such as tundra, steppe and forest, our results imply that, as climatic change reduces the stability, the effect might be difficult to detect until a point where local disturbances inevitably induce a spatial cascade to the alternative state.

| S-EPMC4340810 | biostudies-literature

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

OmicsDI is an Elixir interoperability service. Learn more ›

Tweets

OmicsDI Databases

PRIDE
PeptideAtlas
MassIVE
JPOST Repository
Physiome Model Repository

EGA
EVA
ENA
LINCS
PAXDB
Cell Collective

MetaboLights
Metabolomics Workbench
MetabolomeExpress
GNPS
BioModels
FAIRDOMHub

ArrayExpress
dbGaP
ExpressionAtlas
GEO
NODE

Information

Databases
Help
API
Contact us
Code on GitHub
Terms of use
Submit Data