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Public good exploitation in natural bacterioplankton communities

Shaul Pollak, Matti Gralka, Yuya Sato, Julia Schwartzman, Lu Lu, Otto X. Cordero
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.12.13.422583
Shaul Pollak
1Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, 02139, Massachusetts, USA
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Matti Gralka
1Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, 02139, Massachusetts, USA
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Yuya Sato
2Management Research Institute, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), 16-1 Onogawa, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, 305-8569, Japan
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Julia Schwartzman
1Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, 02139, Massachusetts, USA
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Lu Lu
1Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, 02139, Massachusetts, USA
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Otto X. Cordero
1Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, 02139, Massachusetts, USA
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  • For correspondence: ottox@mit.edu
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Abstract

Public good exploitation has been studied extensively from an evolutionary lens, but little is known about the occurrence and impact of public good exploiters in natural communities. Here, we develop a reverse ecology approach to systematically identify bacteria that can exploit public goods produced during the degradation of polysaccharides. Focusing on chitin – the second most abundant biopolymer on the planet, we show that public good exploiters hinder the growth of degraders and invade marine microbial communities during early stages of colonization. Unlike cheaters in social evolution, exploiters and polysaccharide degraders (cooperators) come together by a process of community assembly, belong to distant lineages, and can stably coexist. Thus, our approach opens novel avenues to interpret the wealth of genomic data through an ecological lens.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission.
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Posted December 14, 2020.
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Public good exploitation in natural bacterioplankton communities
Shaul Pollak, Matti Gralka, Yuya Sato, Julia Schwartzman, Lu Lu, Otto X. Cordero
bioRxiv 2020.12.13.422583; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.12.13.422583
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Public good exploitation in natural bacterioplankton communities
Shaul Pollak, Matti Gralka, Yuya Sato, Julia Schwartzman, Lu Lu, Otto X. Cordero
bioRxiv 2020.12.13.422583; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.12.13.422583

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