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How quorum sensing and evolution is related and what is the processes.
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Quorum Sensing - Kin Selection - Virulence Melih Kaplan - 2359537 Quorum sensing is an adaptive trait of the sociality of the bacteria, and it is closely related to cooperative ability. The efficiency of the quorum sensing is dependent on a ratio of “cooperative phenotype advantage” to “competition and cheating” of the bacterial populations and their density behavior combined with it. (Schluter, et al.,
QS is mainly measured with the release of the extracellular factors released by the individuals and the response by the other individuals of the population. Accordingly to the response, the structure of the population is determined. In the article named “ Kin selection, quorum sensing and virulence in pathogenic bacteria” the researchers took benefit from an in vivo experiment using mice to investigate the relationship between quorum sensing and the relatedness of the strains of the pathogenic bacteria. In the experiment, two strains, the wild-type able to respond to the quorum sensing factors, and lasR not able to respond to those factors, are used. The reason why these two strains are used was due to the ease of examination of only one variable. Therefore, they aimed to have a causative explanation for the quorum sensing and pathogen evolution relationship. They found that high relatedness favors the QS wild-type, which can build a cooperating system, while low relatedness favors lasR mutants that can make use of extracellular factors of the wild-type, in a way, the lasR strain is the cheater corrupting the cooperation. In low-relatedness samples where two strains are present simultaneously, the quorum sensing was not strong due to the cheating behavior of lasR, and thus, no such behavior as kin selection is observed, in contrast to high-relatedness samples where cooperation is the main driver of pathogenicity and virulence Another finding was that higher relatedness brings about an increase in growth and, thus, a higher virulence due to the fact that cooperation is only advantageous when all the individuals are committed to it. As a comment, the relatedness and the virulence should be considered as a crucial dynamic duo for the quorum sensing evolution. (Rumbaugh, et al., 2012)
References Rumbaugh, K. P., Trivedi, U., Watters, C., Burton-Chellew, M. N., Diggle, S. P., & West, S. A. (2012). Kin selection, quorum sensing and virulence in pathogenic bacteria. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 279(1742), 3584–3588. doi:10.1098/rspb.2012. Schluter, J., Schoech, A. P., Foster, K. R., & Mitri, S. (2016). The Evolution of Quorum Sensing as a Mechanism to Infer Kinship. PLOS Computational Biology, 12(4), e1004848. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.