Bastiaans Eric, Debets Alfons J M, Aanen Duur K
Department of Plant Sciences, Laboratory of Genetics, Wageningen University, Wageningen 6708 PB, The Netherlands.
Nat Commun. 2016 May 3;7:11435. doi: 10.1038/ncomms11435.
In multicellular organisms, there is a potential risk that cheating mutants gain access to the germline. Development from a single-celled zygote resets relatedness among cells to its maximum value each generation, which should accomplish segregation of cheating mutants from non-cheaters and thereby protect multicellular cooperation. Here we provide the crucial direct comparison between high- and low-relatedness conditions to test this hypothesis. We allow two variants of the fungus Neurospora crassa to evolve, one with and one without the ability to form chimeras with other individuals, thus generating two relatedness levels. While multicellular cooperation remains high in the high-relatedness lines, it significantly decreases in all replicate low-relatedness lines, resulting in an average threefold decrease in spore yield. This reduction is caused by cheating mutants with reduced investment in somatic functions, but increased competitive success when fusing with non-cheaters. Our experiments demonstrate that high genetic relatedness is crucial to sustain multicellular cooperation.
在多细胞生物中，存在一种风险，即作弊突变体有可能进入生殖系。从单细胞受精卵发育而来，会使细胞间的亲缘关系在每一代都重置为最大值，这应该能实现作弊突变体与非作弊者的分离，从而保护多细胞合作。在此，我们对高亲缘关系和低亲缘关系条件进行了关键的直接比较，以检验这一假设。我们让粗糙脉孢菌的两个变体进行进化，一个具有与其他个体形成嵌合体的能力，另一个则没有，从而产生了两个亲缘关系水平。在高亲缘关系品系中，多细胞合作水平仍然很高，而在所有重复的低亲缘关系品系中，多细胞合作水平显著下降，导致孢子产量平均下降了三倍。这种下降是由对体细胞功能投入减少但与非作弊者融合时竞争成功率增加的作弊突变体引起的。我们的实验表明，高遗传亲缘关系对于维持多细胞合作至关重要。
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