Explaining the sociobiology of pyoverdin producing Pseudomonas: a comment on Zhang and Rainey (2013).
Over the past decade, there has been enormous interest in understanding the great diversity of microbial cooperative behaviors, including communication, group-based swarming, fruiting-body formation, and the secretion of group-beneficial enzymes and food-scavenging molecules. Zhang and Rainey, henceforth Z&R, recently contended that sociomicrobiologists have been overzealous in their casting of microbes as inherently social organisms, and too hasty in interpreting microbial behaviors in a social evolutionary framework. This challenge accompanied a set of experiments in which they revisited one of the best-studied social behaviors in bacteria-the production of diffusible, sharable iron-scavenging siderophore molecules. Z&R posit that their findings challenge the view that siderophore production is a cooperative trait. Here, we demonstrate that their arguments are flawed, and stem from both technical mistakes and misunderstandings of social evolution theory.
Institute of Plant Biology, University of Zürich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, 8057 Zürich, Switzerland. rolf.kuemmerli@uzh.ch.
Rolf
R
Kümmerli
Adin
A
Ross-Gillespie
D005075:Biological Evolution; D009842:Oligopeptides / Q000096:biosynthesis*; D011549:Pseudomonas / Q000235:genetics* / Q000378:metabolism*
D009842:Oligopeptides
Cheating; environmental conditions; maladaptation; public goods cooperation; siderophore; social evolution theory