Thank you, Daniel!

Thank you, Zamin! Safe travels.

Our findings suggest that tailocin resistance may come with predictable fitness costs. That means tailocins could be a promising therapeutic avenue: even if resistance evolves, it may weaken pathogens in natural or clinical settings.

(8/n)

This challenges the idea that evolution always finds a workaround. Sometimes, molecular constraints lock lineages into long-term evolutionary compromises.

(7/n)

Why does the trade-off persist?
Because both competition and colonization hinge on the same surface molecule. The O-antigen is a case of antagonistic pleiotropy – you can’t optimize one function without hurting the other.

(6/n)

What surprised us: this trade-off isn’t transient.
Using herbarium samples up to 200 years old, we show that the same genetic variants have persisted across 10⁵–10⁶ generations, with no evidence of widespread escape via recombination.
Natural selection keeps circling the same solutions.

(5/n)

We found that in Pseudomonas viridiflava (a natural pathogen of Arabidopsis thaliana), strains that resist tailocins lose efficiency at colonizing host plants. And those that colonize well remain vulnerable to tailocin attack.
A classic evolutionary trade-off.

(4/n)

Many Gram negative bacteria fight using tailocins – phage-derived molecular weapons that kill close relatives by binding to specific O-antigen receptors on the cell surface.
Powerful in warfare… but costly.

(3/n)

We found that a bacterial trade-off between microbial competition and host colonization has persisted in nature for over ~10^5 generations (200 years), despite massive evolutionary opportunities to escape it.

(2/n)