TY - JOUR TI - Repeated outbreaks drive the evolution of bacteriophage communication AU - Doekes, Hilje M AU - Mulder, Glenn A AU - Hermsen, Rutger A2 - Díaz-Muñoz, Samuel L A2 - Walczak, Aleksandra M A2 - Díaz-Muñoz, Samuel L VL - 10 PY - 2021 DA - 2021/01/18 SP - e58410 C1 - eLife 2021;10:e58410 DO - 10.7554/eLife.58410 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.58410 AB - Recently, a small-molecule communication mechanism was discovered in a range of Bacillus-infecting bacteriophages, which these temperate phages use to inform their lysis-lysogeny decision. We present a mathematical model of the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of such viral communication and show that a communication strategy in which phages use the lytic cycle early in an outbreak (when susceptible host cells are abundant) but switch to the lysogenic cycle later (when susceptible cells become scarce) is favoured over a bet-hedging strategy in which cells are lysogenised with constant probability. However, such phage communication can evolve only if phage-bacteria populations are regularly perturbed away from their equilibrium state, so that acute outbreaks of phage infections in pools of susceptible cells continue to occur. Our model then predicts the selection of phages that switch infection strategy when half of the available susceptible cells have been infected. KW - bacteriophages KW - communication KW - arbitrium KW - evolution KW - modelling JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -