MOLECULAR GENETICS OF ADAPTATION IN AN EXPERIMENTAL MODEL OF COOPERATION.

The evolution of cooperation was studied in an empirical system utilizing a parasitic bacteriophage (f1) and a bacterial host. Infected cells were propagated by serial passage so that a phage could increase its representation among infected hosts only by enhancing the rate of growth of its host. Loss of infectivity was therefore without selective penalty, and phage benevolence could potentially evolve through a variety of genetic changes. The infected hosts evolved to grow faster over the course of the study, but the genetic bases of this phenotypic change were more difficult to anticipate. Two fundamentally different types of genetic changes in the phage were revealed. One involved the loss of some phage genes, resulting in a noninfectious plasmid that continued to replicate via the parental phage replicon. The second change involved integration of the phage genome into host DNA by a process that, at low frequency, could be reversed to produce infectious phage particles. Integration is a previously unknown property of wild-type f1, and in the system studied, may have resulted from the use of a phage bearing an insert containing nonfunctional DNA. The evolution of this novel function apparently depended only on the presence of a small region in the phage genome that provided some homology to the host DNA, with the host providing all necessary functions. Although f1 is one of the simplest phages known, these observations suggest that host-parasite interactions of the filamentous phages are more complicated than previously thought. More generally, the f1 system offers a useful model for many problems concerning the genetic basis of adaptation. © 1992 The Society for the Study of Evolution.