Harrington Kyle I, Sanchez Alvaro
DEMO Lab; Department of Computer Science; Brandeis University; Waltham MA USA; The Rowland Institute; Harvard University; Cambridge, MA USA.
The Rowland Institute; Harvard University; Cambridge, MA USA.
Commun Integr Biol. 2014 Jan 1;7(1):e28230. doi: 10.4161/cib.28230. Epub 2014 Feb 25.
Microbial communities abound with examples of complex social interactions that shape microbial ecosystems. One particularly striking example is microbial cooperation via the secretion of public goods. It has been suggested by theory, and recently demonstrated experimentally, that microbial population dynamics and the evolutionary dynamics of cooperative social genes take place with similar timescales, and are linked to each other via an eco-evolutionary feedback loop. We overview this recent evidence, and discuss the possibility that a third process may be also part of this loop: phenotypic dynamics. Complex social strategies may be implemented at the single-cell level by means of gene regulatory networks. Thus gene expression plasticity or stochastic gene expression, both of which may occur with a timescale of one to a few generations, can potentially lead to a three-way coupling between behavioral dynamics, population dynamics, and evolutionary dynamics.
微生物群落中存在着大量塑造微生物生态系统的复杂社会互动实例。一个特别显著的例子是通过分泌公共物品进行的微生物合作。理论上已提出，且最近通过实验得到证实，微生物种群动态和合作社会基因的进化动态在相似的时间尺度上发生，并通过生态进化反馈环相互关联。我们概述了这一最新证据，并讨论了第三个过程也可能是这个环的一部分的可能性：表型动态。复杂的社会策略可能通过基因调控网络在单细胞水平上得以实施。因此，基因表达可塑性或随机基因表达，这两者都可能在一代到几代的时间尺度上发生，有可能导致行为动态、种群动态和进化动态之间的三方耦合。
