October WEES with Dr. Christian Kost

We would like to invite you to attend October’s IN-PERSON Wageningen Evolution & Ecology Seminar (WEES) and afternoon workshop! The seminar will take place on Thursday, October 13^th, 16:00-17:00h in Orion C3033, where Dr. Christian Kost from Universität Osnabrück will present his work on “Evolution of mutualistic cooperation within microbial communities”.  There will also be a workshop with Dr. Kost about the topic of “Are bacteria multicellular organisms?” from 14:00-15:30 in Orion B4044. The workshop is aimed for HBO, MSc, PhD students, and postdocs. Registration is required, so please email Alanna Leale (alanna.leale@wur.nl) to register. See below for more information.

Evolution of mutualistic cooperation within microbial communities 
 Dr. Christian Kost
Professor, Department of Ecology, Universität Osnabrück, Germany

 Cooperative interactions challenge evolutionary theory: why should one organism invest costly resources to benefit other individuals rather than using them to enhance its own fitness? Despite this conundrum, obligate interactions, in which two or more microorganisms exchange costly metabolites, are very common in natural microbial communities. However, the factors facilitating the evolution of metabolic cooperation remain poorly understood.

We address this issue by analysing both genetically engineered and experimentally evolved metabolic cross-feeding interactions. Our experiments reveal that adaptive advantages drive the evolution of cooperative cross-feeding within microbial communities: by losing the ability to autonomously synthesize certain metabolites, bacteria become dependent on other community members producing these compounds. The resulting metabolic interdependencies trigger a coevolutionary process, during which reciprocal cooperative investments rapidly increase.

In my talk, I will discuss the evolutionary drivers of this process and highlight how the emergent population dynamics enhances cooperativity within physiologically interconnected consortia.

Workshop (14:00 Orion B4044)

Are bacteria multicellular organisms?

 Microbiology traditionally considers bacterial behaviours from the perspective of an individual cell. In recent years, however, awareness has grown that bacteria mainly occur in groups of cells that typically consist of phenotypically diverse individuals. The resulting bacterial consortia frequently display collective behaviours such as intercellular communication, obligate metabolic cooperation, division of labour, complex life cycles, or altruistic cell suicide that are otherwise considered to be hallmarks of truly multicellular organisms. Thus, understanding bacteria requires a perspective that integrates multiple levels of biological organisation (cell, population, community) and appreciates the ecological and evolutionary contexts that favoured different strategies. Moreover, unravelling the evolutionary mechanisms giving rise to these emergent properties will likely shed new light on how evolution operates on groups of interacting individuals, ultimately causing the emergence of an increased complexity. In this workshop, we will discuss this interesting problem in light of both empirical and theoretical evidence available. Participants are encouraged to browse the corresponding literature beforehand to discuss this issue from their perspective.

The workshop will take place 14:00 to 15:30 in Orion B4044. Registration is required, so please email Alanna Leale (alanna.leale@wur.nl) to register. The workshop gives attendees the opportunity to meet the speaker of the seminar and have a discussion based on recent publications. The workshops are a good possibility to become acquainted with hot topics in science and to gain experience in discussing these topics with leading scientists in the field. Furthermore, BSc and MSc students can get 1 ECTS for attending 2 workshops.

WEES background  
WEES is an initiative of PhD students and postdocs at Wageningen University to organize a continuing series of stimulating seminars on contemporary topics in evolution and ecology. We aim to bring together different groups at Wageningen University using a variety of systems, but with a common interest in evolutionary and ecological questions. For this series we invite researchers from all over the world who have leading roles in their field. After the talk there will be drinks for an informal discussion. WEES is funded by graduate schools PE&RC, WIMEK, EPS, VLAG and WIAS.    

For more information please visit: www.weeswageningen.nl 

Interested in joining the WEES committee and organizing seminars yourself?
WEES is looking for new members! We aim for a broad and diverse range in topics and would like to welcome new members to help and include topics not represented yet. If you are curious, send an email to weeswageningen@gmail.com and join one of our meetings.