Bacterial colonies would rather perform 'evolutionary suicide' than put up with cheater strains that leech off the colony without giving anything back.
Quorum sensing works by regulating the expression of cooperative genes across a population of bacteria through small molecules called autoinducers.
The more bacteria there are, the more autoinducers accumulate. If the concentration of autoinducers rises above critical levels, this triggers changes in the bacteria which, as a group, have outgrown the available resources.Through a mathematical model, the researchers found that quorum sensing has the effect of punishing freeloaders by reducing the availability of shared resources.
But, in some cases, doling out punishment to cheaters hurts the survival of the entire colony as the producers are also starved of resources. "With no alternative nutrients, quorum sensing by producers withholds the only source of nutrients from the whole population, which harms both producers and cheaters in terms of the total population's mean extinction time," the researchers
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