Eco-evolutionary dynamics of nested Darwinian populations and the emergence of community-level heredity

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Abstract

Interactions among microbial cells can generate new chemistries and functions, but exploitation requires establishment of communities that reliably recapitulate community-level phenotypes. Using mechanistic mathematical models, we show how simple manipulations to population structure can exogenously impose Darwinian-like properties on communities. Such scaffolding causes communities to participate directly in the process of evolution by natural selection and drives the evolution of cell-level interactions to the point where, despite underlying stochasticity, derived communities give rise to offspring communities that faithfully re-establish parental phenotype. The mechanism is akin to a developmental process (developmental correction) that arises from density dependent interactions among cells. Knowledge of ecological factors affecting evolution of developmental correction has implications for understanding the evolutionary origin of major egalitarian transitions, symbioses, and for top-down engineering of microbial communities.

Data availability

The source code for all simulations and figures in the manuscript isavailable as a zip file uploaded with the manuscript and in a public gitrepository (https://gitlab.com/ecoevomath/estaudel).

Article and author information

Author details

Guilhem Doulcier

Laboratoire de Génétique de l'Evolution, CNRS UMR 8231, École supérieure de physique et de chimie industrielle de la ville de Paris, PSL University, Paris, France

For correspondence
guilhem.doulcier@ens.fr

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-3720-9089
Amaury Lambert

Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Biology(CIRB), Collège de France, Paris, France

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-7248-9955
Silvia De Monte

Institut de Biologie de l'´Ecole Normale Sup´erieure, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.
Paul B Rainey

Department of Microbial Population Biology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Plön, Germany

Competing interests
Paul B Rainey, PBR is a founder of MilliDrop InstrumentsReviewing editor, eLife.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-0879-5795

Funding

Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-10-IDEX-001-02)

Guilhem Doulcier
Paul B Rainey

Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-10-LABX-54)

Silvia De Monte

Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-11-IDEX-0001-02)

Silvia De Monte

Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

Paul B Rainey

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.