Institute for Integrative Biology, ETH Zürich, Zürich, 8092, Switzerland.
Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School, 02115, Boston, MA, USA.
Nat Commun. 2019 Sep 20;10(1):4301. doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-12140-6.
Generalist bacterial predators are likely to strongly shape many important ecological and evolutionary features of microbial communities, for example by altering the character and pace of molecular evolution, but investigations of such effects are scarce. Here we report how predator-prey interactions alter the evolution of fitness, genomes and phenotypic diversity in coevolving bacterial communities composed of Myxococcus xanthus as predator and Escherichia coli as prey, relative to single-species controls. We show evidence of reciprocal adaptation and demonstrate accelerated genomic evolution specific to coevolving communities, including the rapid appearance of mutator genotypes. Strong parallel evolution unique to the predator-prey communities occurs in both parties, with predators driving adaptation at two prey traits associated with virulence in bacterial pathogens-mucoidy and the outer-membrane protease OmpT. Our results suggest that generalist predatory bacteria are important determinants of how complex microbial communities and their interaction networks evolve in natural habitats.
广义的细菌捕食者很可能会强烈影响微生物群落的许多重要生态和进化特征，例如通过改变分子进化的特征和速度，但此类影响的研究还很缺乏。在这里，我们报告了捕食者-猎物相互作用如何改变由捕食者黄杆菌和猎物大肠杆菌组成的共进化细菌群落中适应性、基因组和表型多样性的进化，与单一物种对照相比。我们提供了相互适应的证据，并证明了共进化群落中特定的加速基因组进化，包括快速出现突变体基因型。这种独特的、与捕食者-猎物群落相关的平行进化在两个方面都发生了，捕食者驱动了与细菌病原体毒力相关的两个猎物特征的适应性——黏液性和外膜蛋白酶 OmpT。我们的结果表明，广义的捕食性细菌是复杂微生物群落及其在自然栖息地中相互作用网络进化的重要决定因素。
