nucleation

THEORY-1235: Losing a costly function whose product leaks to neighbours is favoured by ordinary individual selection in large free-living microbial populations, and the loss proceeds until the remaining producers just supply the community, so that most cells come to depend on a rare few with no relatedness, cooperation or collective required

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Properties5
StatusProposed
Tagsendosymbiosis, ecology
SourceLIT-1568 — The Black Queen Hypothesis: Evolution of Dependencies through Adaptive Gene Loss
ExtendsTHEORY-1048 — On the Black Queen Hypothesis of Morris, Lenski and Zinser, losing a costly function whose product leaks to neighbours is favoured by ordinary individual selection in large free-living microbial populations, and the loss proceeds until the remaining producers just supply the community, so that most cells come to depend on a rare few with no relatedness, cooperation or collective required
Bears onQUESTION-277 — When formerly autonomous partners come to depend on one another, which of mutual dependence, reproductive cohesion, the distribution of essential functions across genomes, the host's regulatory control and the alignment of selection does each route to dependence bring about, and which of them, alone or together, make the partnership a new evolutionary individual?

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Source

Morris, Lenski & Zinser (2012), LIT-1568, read in full in NOTE-1212.

Where the evidence stands

What the hypothesis says is THEORY-1048, Active, which this entry extends. The formal condition follows from its premises; the one worked case, katG in Prochlorococcus, rests on phylogeny and cited physiology, and the other functions are matched to criteria, not analysed. The promote_when above is THEORY-1048’s condition before the twenty-fourth status review promoted it, carried here unchanged, because it asks what would make the thesis true and not what the source says.

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