Making a Pathogen? Evaluating the Impact of Protist Predation on the Evolution of Virulence in Serratia marcescens.

ABSTRACT: Opportunistic pathogens are environmental microbes that are generally harmless and only occasionally cause disease. Unlike obligate pathogens, the growth and survival of opportunistic pathogens do not rely on host infection or transmission. Their versatile lifestyles make it challenging to decipher how and why virulence has evolved in opportunistic pathogens. The coincidental evolution hypothesis postulates that virulence results from exaptation or pleiotropy, i.e. traits evolved for adaptation to living in one environment that have a different function in another. In particular, adaptation to avoid or survive protist predation has been suggested to contribute to the evolution of bacterial virulence (the training ground hypothesis). Here, we used experimental evolution to determine how the

SUBMITTER: Hopkins HA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11332436 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature