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Adaptation to abiotic conditions drives local adaptation in bacteria and viruses coevolving in heterogeneous environments
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2016-02
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Gorter Florien A., Scanlan Pauline D. and Buckling Angus 2016Adaptation to abiotic conditions drives local adaptation in bacteria and viruses coevolving in heterogeneous environmentsBiol. Lett.122015087920150879 http://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2015.0879
Abstract
Parasite local adaptation, the greater performance of parasites on their local
compared with foreign hosts, has important consequences for the maintenance
of diversity and epidemiology. While the abiotic environment may significantly affect local adaptation, most studies to date have failed either to
incorporate the effects of the abiotic environment, or to separate them from
those of the biotic environment. Here, we tease apart biotic and abiotic components of local adaptation using the bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens and
its viral parasite bacteriophage F2. We coevolved replicate populations of bacteria and phages at three different temperatures, and determined their
performance against coevolutionary partners from the same and different
temperatures. Crucially, we measured performance at different assay temperatures, which allowed us to disentangle adaptation to biotic and abiotic habitat
components. Our results show that bacteria and phages are more resistant and
infectious, respectively, at the temperature at which they previously coevolved,
confirming that local adaptation to abiotic conditions can play a crucial role in
determining parasite infectivity and host resistance. Our work underlines the
need to assess host–parasite interactions across multiple relevant abiotic
environments, and suggests that microbial adaption to local temperatures
can create ecological barriers to dispersal across temperature gradients.