dictyNews Volume 41 Number 10

Published in

· 10 months ago

dictyNews 
Electronic Edition 
Volume 41, number 10 
May 15, 2015 

Please submit abstracts of your papers as soon as they have been 
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========= 
Abstracts 
========= 

 
Elizabeth Ostrowski, Yufeng Shen, Xiangjun Tian, Richard  
Sucgang, Huaiyang Jiang, Jiaxin Qu, Mariko Katoh-Kurasawa,  
Debra Brock, Christopher Dinh, Fremiet Lara-Garduno,  
Sandra Lee, Christie Kovar, Huyen Dinh, Viktoriya Korchina,  
Laronda Jackson, Shobha Patil, Yi Han,  Leslie Chaboub,  
Gad Shaulsky, Donna Muzny, Kim Worley, Richard Gibbs,  
Stephen Richards, Adam Kuspa, Joan Strassmann, and  
David Queller. 

Genomic signatures of cooperation and conflict in the  
social amoeba. 

 
Current Biology, in press. 

Cooperative systems are susceptible to invasion by selfish  
individuals that profit from receiving the social benefits  
but fail to contribute. These so-called ÒcheatersÓ can have  
a fitness advantage in the laboratory, but it is unclear  
whether cheating provides an important selective advantage  
in nature. We used a population genomic approach to examine  
the history of genes involved in cheating behaviors in the  
social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum, testing whether  
these genes experience rapid evolutionary change as a result 
 of conflict over spore-stalk fate. Candidate genes and  
 surrounding regions showed elevated polymorphism, unusual  
 patterns of linkage disequilibrium, and lower levels of  
 population differentiation, but they did not show greater  
 between-species divergence. The signatures were most  
 consistent with frequency-dependent selection acting to  
 maintain multiple alleles, suggesting that conflict may  
 lead to stalemate rather than an escalating arms race. Our  
 results reveal the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation  
 and cheating and underscore how sequence-based approaches  
 can be used to elucidate the history of conflicts that are  
 difficult to observe directly. 

Submitted by Elizabeth Ostrowski [eaostrowski@uh.edu] 
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