Obligate mutualistic cooperation limits evolvability

Cooperative mutualisms are widespread and play fundamental roles in many ecosystems. Given that these interactions are often obligate, the Darwinian fitness of the participating individuals is not only determined by the information encoded in their own genomes, but also the traits and capabilities of their corresponding interaction partners. Thus, a major outstanding question is how obligate cooperative mutualisms affect the ability of organisms to adapt evolutionarily to changing environmental conditions. Here we address this issue using a mutualistic cooperation between two auxotrophic genotypes of Escherichia coli that reciprocally exchanged costly amino acids. Amino acid-supplemented monocultures and unsupplemented cocultures were exposed to stepwise increasing concentrations of different antibiotics. This selection experiment reveals that metabolically interdependent bacteria are generally less able to adapt to environmental stress than autonomously growing strains. Moreover, obligate cooperative mutualists frequently regain metabolic autonomy, resulting in a collapse of the mutualistic interaction.