Metabolism and the Evolution of Social Behavior.

Kerry E Boyle, Hilary T Monaco, Maxime Deforet, Jinyuan Yan, Zhe Wang, Kyu Rhee, Joao B Xavier

Molecular biology and evolution 2017 Sep 01

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How does metabolism influence social behavior? This fundamental question at the interface of molecular biology and social evolution is hard to address with experiments in animals, and therefore, we turned to a simple microbial system: swarming in the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Using genetic engineering, we excised a locus encoding a key metabolic regulator and disrupted P. aeruginosa's metabolic prudence, the regulatory mechanism that controls expression of swarming public goods and protects this social behavior from exploitation by cheaters. Then, using experimental evolution, we followed the joint evolution of the genome, the metabolome and the social behavior as swarming re-evolved. New variants emerged spontaneously with mutations that reorganized the metabolome and compensated in distinct ways for the disrupted metabolic prudence. These experiments with a unicellular organism provide a detailed view of how metabolism-currency of all physiological processes-can determine the costs and benefits of a social behavior and ultimately influence how an organism behaves towards other organisms of the same species. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution.

Citation

Kerry E Boyle, Hilary T Monaco, Maxime Deforet, Jinyuan Yan, Zhe Wang, Kyu Rhee, Joao B Xavier. Metabolism and the Evolution of Social Behavior. Molecular biology and evolution. 2017 Sep 01;34(9):2367-2379