Abstract
Medical science is typically pitted against the evolutionary forces acting upon infective populations of bacteria. As an alternative strategy, we could exploit our growing understanding of population dynamics of social traits in bacteria to help treat bacterial disease. In particular, population dynamics of social traits could be exploited to introduce less virulent strains of bacteria, or medically beneficial alleles into infective populations. We discuss how bacterial strains adopting different social strategies can invade a population of cooperative wild-type, considering public good cheats, cheats carrying medically beneficial alleles (Trojan horses) and cheats carrying allelopathic traits (anti-competitor chemical bacteriocins or temperate bacteriophage viruses). We suggest that exploitation of the ability of cheats to invade cooperative, wild-type populations is a potential new strategy for treating bacterial disease.
Highlights
Bacteria and other micro-organisms exhibit a wide range of social behaviours
POPULATION DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL TRAITS we show how social traits may be exploited as part of a medical intervention strategy
We have applied social evolution theory to suggest novel intervention strategies in the treatment of bacterial infection: (i) the introduction of an invasive cheat that does not contribute to the production of a virulence factor can lead to a reduction in parasite virulence, as well as a reduced bacterial population size, that may make the infection more susceptible to other intervention strategies (§2a, figure 2); (ii) cheats could be used as Trojan horses to introduce useful traits such as antibiotic sensitivity into the population (§2b, figure 3); (iii) social dominance by a more benign and controllable microbe could be achieved by harnessing allelopathic traits to the therapeutic strain, that are active against the resident pathogen
Summary
Bacteria and other micro-organisms exhibit a wide range of social behaviours. Technological advances made by microbiologists have overturned the long held assumption that micro-organisms live relatively independent, unicellular lives. Free-riders) that do not produce siderophores are able to exploit those produced by others, and increase in frequency in mixed populations that contain both cooperators and cheats (Griffin et al 2004; Harrison et al 2006) Another layer of complexity is that the release of many exoproducts is regulated in a cell density-dependent manner via diffusible signal molecules by a process that has been termed quorum sensing (QS). We present a number of heuristic models to formally illustrate the possibilities as as possible
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