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The genetics of a putative social trait in natural populations of yeast

Bozdag, GO; Greig, D; (2014) The genetics of a putative social trait in natural populations of yeast. Molecular Ecology , 23 (20) pp. 5061-5071. 10.1111/mec.12904. Green open access

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Abstract

The sharing of secreted invertase by yeast cells is a well established laboratory model for cooperation, but the only evidence that such cooperation occurs in nature is that the SUC loci, which encode invertase, vary in number and functionality. Genotypes that do not produce invertase can act as “cheats” in laboratory experiments, growing on the glucose that is released when invertase producers, or “cooperators”, digest sucrose. However, genetic variation for invertase production might instead be explained by adaptation of different populations to different local availabilities of sucrose, the substrate for invertase. Here we find that, 110 wild yeast strains isolated from natural habitats, all contained a single SUC locus and produced invertase; none were “cheats”. The only genetic variants we found were three strains isolated instead from sucrose-rich nectar, which produced higher levels of invertase from three additional SUC loci at their sub-telomeres. We argue that the pattern of SUC gene variation is better explained by local adaptation than by social conflict.

Type: Article
Title: The genetics of a putative social trait in natural populations of yeast
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1111/mec.12904
Publisher version: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/%28...
Additional information: © 2014 The Authors. Molecular Ecology Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Keywords: Saccharomyces, SUC, cooperation, cheating, copy number variation, droplet digital PCR
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences > Genetics, Evolution and Environment
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1443167
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