Explaining the sociobiology of pyoverdin producing Pseudomonas: a comment on Zhang and Rainey (2013).

Kümmerli R; Ross-Gillespie A

doi:10.1111/evo.12311

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Explaining the sociobiology of pyoverdin producing Pseudomonas: a comment on Zhang and Rainey (2013).

Kümmerli R Institute of Plant Biology, University of Zürich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, 8057 Zürich, Switzerland. rolf.kuemmerli@uzh.ch.
Ross-Gillespie A

2013-11-14

Published in:

Evolution; international journal of organic evolution. - 2014

English 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.

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