Repeated outbreaks drive the evolution of bacteriophage communication

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Abstract

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.

Data availability

All data were obtained through computer simulation. Scripts to run these simulations, simulated data, and analysis scripts are available at GitHub: https://github.com/hiljedoekes/PhageCom.

Article and author information

Author details

Hilje M Doekes

Laboratory of Genetics, Wageningen University, Wageningen, Netherlands

For correspondence
hiljedoekes@gmail.com

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-6360-5176
Glenn A Mulder

Biology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Rutger Hermsen

Science faculty, Biology Department, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-4633-4877

Funding

Human Frontier Science Program (RGY0072/2015)

Hilje M Doekes
Rutger Hermsen

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.