The Evolution of Ecological Interactions During Adaptive Diversification in Pseudomonas Aeruginosa

• Main Author: Houpt, Noah
• Other Authors: Kassen, Rees
• Format: Others
• Language: en
• Published: Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa 2021
• Subjects: Microbial experimental evolution; Evolutionary ecology; Adaptive diversification; Adaptive radiation; Pseudomonas aeruginosa; Biodiversity-ecosystem function; Rare types
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10393/42627; http://dx.doi.org/10.20381/ruor-26847

Ecological opportunity—the availability of open niche space to an evolving lineage—has long been thought to modulate the extent of adaptive diversification. Many microbial evolution experiments have confirmed that ecological opportunity drives diversification of initially homogeneous populations into communities of ecologically distinct sub-lineages (ecotypes). Interactions among ecotypes are crucial for both community function and the maintenance of the ecological diversity produced during adaptive diversification, however the factors influencing the evolution of these interactions remain unexplored. We assessed the influence of ecological opportunity on this process by studying communities of the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa that were evolved in either nutritionally complex (COM) or simple (SIM) environments. We measured the net ecological interactions in these communities by comparing the cellular productivity and competitive fitness of whole communities from each environment to that of their component isolates in both complex and simple media. On average, COM communities had both higher productivity and fitness than their component isolates in complex media, indicating that the components of these communities share net positive interactions. The same was not true of SIM communities, which did not differ in either measure from their component isolates. Follow-up experiments revealed that high fitness in two COM communities was driven by rare variants (frequency < 0.1%) that secrete compounds during growth which inhibit PA14, the strain used as a common competitor for fitness assays. Taken together, our results suggest that environments with high levels of ecological opportunity drive diversification into ecotypes that share net positive ecological interactions. The strong effect of diversity on productivity and fitness we found in newly diversified communities has a number of implications for evolutionary ecology as well as the treatment of P. aeruginosa infections.