![]() ![]() While highly influential as a general proof of social evolution theory, a key open question is whether cheating and the public-goods dilemma also occur in natural microbial communities 8, 9, 10. This body of work has become a paradigm for the public-goods dilemma, showing how a trait that is beneficial for the group can be selected against by the spread of selfish individuals 7. ![]() Many laboratory studies focused on the problem of cheating, a scenario where mutants that no longer contribute to public goods undermine cooperation by capitalising on the public goods secreted by others 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Such public goods include matrix components to build up biofilms, enzymes to digest food, biosurfactants for cooperative swarming and iron-scavenging siderophores 1. Perhaps the most common form of microbial cooperation is the secretion of so-called public goods-compounds that are costly to produce but generate benefits for other cells in the vicinity of the producer 1. While microbes have become model organisms to study the evolution of cooperation in laboratory settings, we still know little about the role of microbial cooperative interactions in complex natural communities. Our findings indicate that there is both selection for cheating and cheating resistance, which could drive antagonistic co-evolution and diversification in natural bacterial communities. While non-producers have genes coding for multiple pyoverdine receptors and are able to exploit compatible heterologous pyoverdines from other community members, producers differ in the pyoverdine types they secrete, offering protection against exploitation from non-producers with incompatible receptors. We find that pyoverdine non- and low-producers co-occur in many natural communities. Here, we show that social interactions mediated by a single shareable compound necessary for growth (the iron-scavenging pyoverdine) have important consequences for competitive dynamics in soil and pond communities of Pseudomonas bacteria. Although bacteria have become model organisms to study social dilemmas in laboratory systems, we know little about their relevance in natural communities. All social organisms experience dilemmas between cooperators performing group-beneficial actions and cheats selfishly exploiting these actions. ![]()
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