Individual- versus group-optimality in the production of secreted bacterial compounds

How unicellular organisms optimize the production of compounds is a fundamental biological question. While it is typically thought that production is optimized at the individual-cell level, secreted compounds could also allow for optimization at the group level, leading to a division of labor where a subset of cells produces and shares the compound with everyone. Using mathematical modeling, we show that the evolution of such division of labor depends on the cost function of compound production. Specifically, for any trait with saturating benefits, linear costs promote the evolution of uniform production levels across cells. Conversely, production costs that diminish with higher output levels favor the evolution of specialization-especially when compound shareability is high. When experimentally testing these predictions with pyoverdine, a secreted iron-scavenging compound produced by Pseudomonas aeruginosa, we found linear costs and, consistent with our model, detected uniform pyoverdine production levels across cells. We conclude that for shared compounds with saturating benefits, the evolution of division of labor is facilitated by a diminishing cost function. More generally, we note that shifts in the level of selection from individuals to groups do not solely require cooperation, but critically depend on mechanistic factors, including the distribution of compound synthesis costs.

Do Bacterial "Virulence Factors" Always Increase Virulence? A Meta-Analysis of Pyoverdine Production in Pseudomonas aeruginosa As a Test Case

Bacterial traits that contribute to disease are termed “virulence factors” and there is much interest in therapeutic approaches that disrupt such traits. What remains less clear is whether a virulence factor identified as such in a particular context is also important in infections involving different host and pathogen types. Here, we address this question using a meta-analytic approach. We statistically analyzed the infection outcomes of 81 experiments associated with one well-studied virulence factor—pyoverdine, an iron-scavenging compound secreted by the opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa. We found that this factor is consistently involved with virulence across different infection contexts. However, the magnitude of the effect of pyoverdine on virulence varied considerably. Moreover, its effect on virulence was relatively minor in many cases, suggesting that pyoverdine is not indispensable in infections. Our works supports theoretical models from ecology predicting that disease severity is multifactorial and context dependent, a fact that might complicate our efforts to identify the most important virulence factors. More generally, our study highlights how comparative approaches can be used to quantify the magnitude and general importance of virulence factors, key knowledge informing future anti-virulence treatment strategies.

Manipulating virulence factor availability can have complex consequences for infections

Given the rise of bacterial resistance against antibiotics, we urgently need alternative strategies to fight infections. Some propose we should disarm rather than kill bacteria, through targeted disruption of their virulence factors. It is assumed that this approach (i) induces weak selection for resistance because it should only minimally impact bacterial fitness, and (ii) is specific, only interfering with the virulence factor in question. Given that pathogenicity emerges from complex interactions between pathogens, hosts and their environment, such assumptions may be unrealistic. To address this issue in a test case, we conducted experiments with the opportunistic human pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa, where we manipulated the availability of a virulence factor, the iron‐scavenging pyoverdine, within the insect host Galleria mellonella. We observed that pyoverdine availability was not stringently predictive of virulence and affected bacterial fitness in nonlinear ways. We show that this complexity could partly arise because pyoverdine availability affects host responses and alters the expression of regulatorily linked virulence factors. Our results reveal that virulence factor manipulation feeds back on pathogen and host behaviour, which in turn affects virulence. Our findings highlight that realizing effective and evolutionarily robust antivirulence therapies will ultimately require deeper engagement with the intrinsic complexity of host–pathogen systems.

Collective decision-making in microbes

Microbes are intensely social organisms that routinely cooperate and coordinate their activities to express elaborate population level phenotypes. Such coordination requires a process of collective decision-making, in which individuals detect and collate information not only from their physical environment, but also from their social environment, in order to arrive at an appropriately calibrated response. Here, we present a conceptual overview of collective decision-making as it applies to all group-living organisms; we introduce key concepts and principles developed in the context of animal and human group decisions; and we discuss, with appropriate examples, the applicability of each of these concepts in microbial contexts. In particular, we discuss the roles of information pooling, control skew, speed vs. accuracy trade-offs, local feedbacks, quorum thresholds, conflicts of interest, and the reliability of social information. We conclude that collective decision-making in microbes shares many features with collective decision-making in higher taxa, and we call for greater integration between this fledgling field and other allied areas of research, including in the humanities and the physical sciences.

Gallium-mediated siderophore quenching as an evolutionarily robust antibacterial treatment

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

Conventional antibiotics select strongly for resistance and are consequently losing efficacy worldwide. Extracellular quenching of shared virulence factors could represent a more promising strategy because (i) it reduces the available routes to resistance (as extracellular action precludes any mutations blocking a drug's entry into cells or hastening its exit) and (ii) it weakens selection for resistance, as fitness benefits to emergent mutants are diluted across all cells in a cooperative collective. Here, we tested this hypothesis empirically.

METHODOLOGY

We used gallium to quench the iron-scavenging siderophores secreted and shared among pathogenic Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria, and quantitatively monitored its effects on growth in vitro. We assayed virulence in acute infections of caterpillar hosts (Galleria mellonella), and tracked resistance emergence over time using experimental evolution.

RESULTS

Gallium strongly inhibited bacterial growth in vitro, primarily via its siderophore quenching activity. Moreover, bacterial siderophore production peaked at intermediate gallium concentrations, indicating additional metabolic costs in this range. In vivo, gallium attenuated virulence and growth-even more so than in infections with siderophore-deficient strains. Crucially, while resistance soon evolved against conventional antibiotic treatments, gallium treatments retained their efficacy over time.

CONCLUSIONS

Extracellular quenching of bacterial public goods could offer an effective and evolutionarily robust control strategy.

Switching between apparently redundant iron-uptake mechanisms benefits bacteria in changeable environments

Bacteria often possess multiple siderophore-based iron uptake systems for scavenging this vital resource from their environment. However, some siderophores seem redundant, because they have limited iron-binding efficiency and are seldom expressed under iron limitation. Here, we investigate the conundrum of why selection does not eliminate this apparent redundancy. We focus on Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacterium that can produce two siderophores-the highly efficient but metabolically expensive pyoverdine, and the inefficient but metabolically cheap pyochelin. We found that the bacteria possess molecular mechanisms to phenotypically switch from mainly producing pyoverdine under severe iron limitation to mainly producing pyochelin when iron is only moderately limited. We further show that strains exclusively producing pyochelin grew significantly better than strains exclusively producing pyoverdine under moderate iron limitation, whereas the inverse was seen under severe iron limitation. This suggests that pyochelin is not redundant, but that switching between siderophore strategies might be beneficial to trade off efficiencies versus costs of siderophores. Indeed, simulations parameterized from our data confirmed that strains retaining the capacity to switch between siderophores significantly outcompeted strains defective for one or the other siderophore under fluctuating iron availabilities. Finally, we discuss how siderophore switching can be viewed as a form of collective decision-making, whereby a coordinated shift in behaviour at the group level emerges as a result of positive and negative feedback loops operating among individuals at the local scale.

Fitness correlates with the extent of cheating in a bacterium

There is growing awareness of the importance of cooperative behaviours in microbial communities. Empirical support for this insight comes from experiments using mutant strains, termed 'cheats', which exploit the cooperative behaviour of wild-type strains. However, little detailed work has gone into characterising the competitive dynamics of cooperative and cheating strains. We test three specific predictions about the fitness consequences of cheating to different extents by examining the production of the iron-scavenging siderophore molecule, pyoverdin, in the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa. We create a collection of mutants that differ in the amount of pyoverdin that they produce (from 1% to 96% of the production of paired wild types) and demonstrate that these production levels correlate with both gene activity and the ability to bind iron. Across these mutants, we found that (1) when grown in a mixed culture with a cooperative wild-type strain, the relative fitness of a mutant is negatively correlated with the amount of pyoverdin that it produces; (2) the absolute and relative fitness of the wild-type strain in the mixed culture is positively correlated with the amount of pyoverdin that the mutant produces; and (3) when grown in a monoculture, the absolute fitness of the mutant is positively correlated with the amount of pyoverdin that it produces. Overall, we demonstrate that cooperative pyoverdin production is exploitable and illustrate how variation in a social behaviour determines fitness differently, depending on the social environment.

Quorum sensing and the social evolution of bacterial virulence

The ability of pathogenic bacteria to exploit their hosts depends upon various virulence factors, released in response to the concentration of small autoinducer molecules that are also released by the bacteria [1-5]. In vitro experiments suggest that autoinducer molecules are signals used to coordinate cooperative behaviors and that this process of quorum sensing (QS) can be exploited by individual cells that avoid the cost of either producing or responding to signal [6, 7]. However, whether QS is an exploitable social trait in vivo, and the implications for the evolution of virulence [5, 8-10], remains untested. We show that in mixed infections of the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa, containing quorum-sensing bacteria and mutants that do not respond to signal, virulence in an animal (mouse) model is reduced relative to that of an infection containing no mutants. We show that this is because mutants act as cheats, exploiting the cooperative production of signal and virulence factors by others, and hence increase in frequency. This supports the idea that the invasion of QS mutants in infections of humans [11-13] is due to their social fitness consequences [6, 7, 14] and predicts that increased strain diversity will select for lower virulence.

Density dependence and cooperation: theory and a test with bacteria

Although cooperative systems can persist in nature despite the potential for exploitation by noncooperators, it is often observed that small changes in population demography can tip the balance of selective forces for or against cooperation. Here we consider the role of population density in the context of microbial cooperation. First, we account for conflicting results from recent studies by demonstrating theoretically that: (1) for public goods cooperation, higher densities are relatively unfavorable for cooperation; (2) in contrast, for self-restraint-type cooperation, higher densities can be either favorable or unfavorable for cooperation, depending on the details of the system. We then test our predictions concerning public goods cooperation using strains of the pathogenic bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa that produce variable levels of a public good-iron-scavenging siderophore molecules. As predicted, we found that the relative fitness of cheats (under-producers) was greatest at higher population densities. Furthermore, as assumed by theory, we show that this occurs because cheats are better able to exploit the cooperative siderophore production of other cells when they are physically closer to them.

Viral epizootic reveals inbreeding depression in a habitually inbreeding mammal

Inbreeding is typically detrimental to fitness. However, some animal populations are reported to inbreed without incurring inbreeding depression, ostensibly due to past “purging” of deleterious alleles. Challenging this is the position that purging can, at best, only adapt a population to a particular environment; novel selective regimes will always uncover additional inbreeding load. We consider this in a prominent test case: the eusocial naked mole‐rat (Heterocephalus glaber), one of the most inbred of all free‐living mammals. We investigated factors affecting mortality in a population of naked mole‐rats struck by a spontaneous, lethal coronavirus outbreak. In a multivariate model, inbreeding coefficient strongly predicted mortality, with closely inbred mole‐rats (F≥ 0.25) over 300% more likely to die than their outbred counterparts. We demonstrate that, contrary to common assertions, strong inbreeding depression is evident in this species. Our results suggest that loss of genetic diversity through inbreeding may render populations vulnerable to local extinction from emerging infectious diseases even when other inbreeding depression symptoms are absent.

Frequency dependence and cooperation: theory and a test with bacteria

Hamilton's inclusive fitness theory provides a leading explanation for the problem of cooperation. A general result from inclusive fitness theory is that, except under restrictive conditions, cooperation should not be subject to frequency-dependent selection. However, several recent studies in microbial systems have demonstrated that the relative fitness of cheaters, which do not cooperate, is greater when cheaters are rarer. Here we demonstrate theoretically that such frequency-dependent selection can occur in microbes when there is (1) sufficient population structuring or (2) an association between the level of cooperation and total population growth. We test prediction (2) and its underlying assumption, using the pathogenic bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa, by competing strains that produce iron-scavenging siderophore molecules (cooperators) with nonproducers (cheaters) at various ratios, under conditions that minimize population structuring. We found that both the relative fitness of cheaters and the productivity of the mixed culture were significantly negatively related to initial cheater frequency. Furthermore, when the period of population growth was experimentally shortened, the strength of frequency dependence was reduced. More generally, we argue that frequency-dependent selection on cooperative traits may be more common in microbes than in metazoans because strong selection, structuring, and cooperation-dependent growth will be more common in microbial populations.