45
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: not found
      • Article: not found

      Host–parasite ‘Red Queen’ dynamics archived in pond sediment

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisherPubMed
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Antagonistic interactions between hosts and parasites are a key structuring force in natural populations, driving coevolution. However, direct empirical evidence of long-term host-parasite coevolution, in particular 'Red Queen' dynamics--in which antagonistic biotic interactions such as host-parasite interactions can lead to reciprocal evolutionary dynamics--is rare, and current data, although consistent with theories of antagonistic coevolution, do not reveal the temporal dynamics of the process. Dormant stages of both the water flea Daphnia and its microparasites are conserved in lake sediments, providing an archive of past gene pools. Here we use this fact to reconstruct rapid coevolutionary dynamics in a natural setting and show that the parasite rapidly adapts to its host over a period of only a few years. A coevolutionary model based on negative frequency-dependent selection, and designed to mimic essential aspects of our host-parasite system, corroborated these experimental results. In line with the idea of continuing host-parasite coevolution, temporal variation in parasite infectivity changed little over time. In contrast, from the moment the parasite was first found in the sediments, we observed a steady increase in virulence over time, associated with higher fitness of the parasite.

          Related collections

          Most cited references28

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: found
          • Article: not found

          Biological and biomedical implications of the co-evolution of pathogens and their hosts.

          Co-evolution between host and pathogen is, in principle, a powerful determinant of the biology and genetics of infection and disease. Yet co-evolution has proven difficult to demonstrate rigorously in practice, and co-evolutionary thinking is only just beginning to inform medical or veterinary research in any meaningful way, even though it can have a major influence on how genetic variation in biomedically important traits is interpreted. Improving our understanding of the biomedical significance of co-evolution will require changing the way in which we look for it, complementing the phenomenological approach traditionally favored by evolutionary biologists with the exploitation of the extensive data becoming available on the molecular biology and molecular genetics of host-pathogen interactions.
            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: not found
            • Article: not found

            Sex versus Non-Sex versus Parasite

              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: found
              • Article: not found

              Experimental evolution of parasites.

              Serial passage experiments are a form of experimental evolution that is frequently used in applied sciences; for example, in vaccine development. During these experiments, molecular and phenotypic evolution can be monitored in real time, providing insights into the causes and consequences of parasite evolution. Within-host competition generally drives an increase in a parasite's virulence in a new host, whereas the parasite becomes avirulent to its former host, indicating a trade-off between parasite fitnesses on different hosts. Understanding why parasite virulence seldom escalates similarly in natural populations could help us to manage virulence and deal with emerging diseases.
                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Journal
                Nature
                Nature
                Springer Science and Business Media LLC
                0028-0836
                1476-4687
                December 2007
                November 14 2007
                December 2007
                : 450
                : 7171
                : 870-873
                Article
                10.1038/nature06291
                18004303
                93a14700-8ab0-48dd-a4c2-4bb1409767cd
                © 2007

                http://www.springer.com/tdm

                History

                Comments

                Comment on this article