0000000000442009
AUTHOR
Teppo Hiltunen
showing 21 related works from this author
Conjugative ESBL plasmids differ in their potential to rescue susceptible bacteria via horizontal gene transfer in lethal antibiotic concentrations.
2017
Conjugative ESBL plasmids differ in their potential to rescue susceptible bacteria via horizontal gene transfer in lethal antibiotic concentrations
Rapid evolutionary adaptation to elevated salt concentrations in pathogenic freshwater bacteria Serratia marcescens.
2014
Rapid evolutionary adaptions to new and previously detrimental environmental conditions can increase the risk of invasion by novel pathogens. We tested this hypothesis with a 133-day-long evolutionary experiment studying the evolution of the pathogenic Serratia marcescens bacterium at salinity niche boundary and in fluctuating conditions. We found that S. marcescens evolved at harsh (80 g/L) and extreme (100 g/L) salt conditions had clearly improved salt tolerance than those evolved in the other three treatments (ancestral conditions, nonsaline conditions, and fluctuating salt conditions). Evolutionary theories suggest that fastest evolutionary changes could be observed in intermediate sele…
Interactions between environmental variability and immigration rate control patterns of species diversity
2006
Abstract Theories focussing on local competition processes predict that species diversity is maximised with high-frequency environmental variability or alternatively with intermediate frequencies. The models coupling regional processes to local explanations of diversity patterns predict that the immigration rate from a regional species pool can strongly increase diversity. However, the interaction between local and regional processes in temporally fluctuating environment has received little attention. We explored in a simulation study how the patterns of species diversity are affected by the frequency spectrum of stochastic environmental variations and density independent immigration rate i…
Protist predation can select for bacteria with lowered susceptibility to infection by lytic phages
2015
Background: Consumer-resource interactions constitute one of the most common types of interspecific antagonistic interaction. In natural communities, complex species interactions are likely to affect the outcomes of reciprocal co-evolution between consumers and their resource species. Individuals face multiple enemies simultaneously, and consequently they need to adapt to several different types of enemy pressures. In this study, we assessed how protist predation affects the susceptibility of bacterial populations to infection by viral parasites, and whether there is an associated cost of defence on the competitive ability of the bacteria. As a study system we used Serratia marcescens and i…
Temporal variability in detritus resource maintains diversity of bacterial communities
2008
Competition theory generally predicts that diversity is maintained by temporal environmental fluctuations. One of the many suggested mechanisms for maintaining diversity in fluctuating environments is the gleaner-opportunist trade-off, whereby gleaner species have low threshold resource levels and low maximum growth rates in high resource concentration while opportunist species show opposite characteristics. We measured the growth rates of eight heterotrophic aquatic bacteria under different concentrations of chemically complex plant detritus resource. The growth rates revealed gleaner-opportunist trade-offs. The role of environmental variability in maintaining diversity was tested in a 28-…
Predation and resource fluctuations drive eco-evolutionary dynamics of a bacterial community
2012
Predation and temporal resource availability are among the most important factors determining prey community dynamics and composition. Both factors have been shown to affect prey diversity, but less is known about their interactive effects, especially in rapidly evolving prey communities. In a laboratory microcosm experiment, we manipulated the presence of the predatory protozoan Tetrahymena thermophila and the temporal patterns in the availability of resources for a bacterial prey community. We found that both predation and temporal fluctuations in prey resources resulted in a more even prey community, and these factors also interacted so that the effect of predation was only seen in a flu…
Pulsed-resource dynamics increase the asymmetry of antagonistic coevolution between a predatory protist and a prey bacterium
2011
Temporal resource fluctuations could affect the strength of antagonistic coevolution through population dynamics and costs of adaptation. We studied this by coevolving the prey bacterium Serratia marcescens with the predatory protozoa Tetrahymena thermophila in constant and pulsed-resource environments for approximately 1300 prey generations. Consistent with arms race theory, the prey evolved to be more defended, whereas the predator evolved to be more efficient in consuming the bacteria. Coevolutionary adaptations were costly in terms of reduced prey growth in resource-limited conditions and less efficient predator growth on nonliving resource medium. However, no differences in mean coevol…
Predation on Multiple Trophic Levels Shapes the Evolution of Pathogen Virulence
2009
The pathogen virulence is traditionally thought to co-evolve as a result of reciprocal selection with its host organism. In natural communities, pathogens and hosts are typically embedded within a web of interactions with other species, which could affect indirectly the pathogen virulence and host immunity through trade-offs. Here we show that selection by predation can affect both pathogen virulence and host immune defence. Exposing opportunistic bacterial pathogen Serratia marcescens to predation by protozoan Tetrahymena thermophila decreased its virulence when measured as host moth Parasemia plantaginis survival. This was probably because the bacterial anti-predatory traits were traded o…
Sublethal streptomycin concentrations and lytic bacteriophage together promote resistance evolution.
2017
Sub-minimum inhibiting concentrations (sub-MICs) of antibiotics frequently occur in natural environments owing to wide-spread antibiotic leakage by human action. Even though the concentrations are very low, these sub-MICs have recently been shown to alter bacterial populations by selecting for antibiotic resistance and increasing the rate of adaptive evolution. However, studies are lacking on how these effects reverberate into key ecological interactions, such as bacteria-phage interactions. Previously, co-selection of bacteria by phages and antibiotic concentrations exceeding MICs has been hypothesized to decrease the rate of resistance evolution because of fitness costs associated with re…
Effect of resource availability on evolution of virulence and competition in an environmentally transmitted pathogen
2018
Understanding ecological and epidemiological factors driving pathogen evolution in contemporary time scales is a major challenge in modern health management. Pathogens that replicate outside the hosts are subject to selection imposed by ambient environmental conditions. Increased nutrient levels could increase pathogen virulence by pre-adapting for efficient use of resources upon contact to a nutrient rich host or by favouring transmission of fast-growing virulent strains. We measured changes in virulence and competition in Flavobacterium columnare, a bacterial pathogen of freshwater fish, under high and low nutrient levels. To test competition between strains in genotype mixtures, we devel…
Scoping the effectiveness and evolutionary obstacles in using plasmid-dependent phages to fight antibiotic resistance
2016
Aim: To investigate the potential evolutionary obstacles in the sustainable therapeutic use of plasmid-dependent phages to control the clinically important conjugative plasmid-mediated dissemination of antibiotic resistance genes to pathogenic bacteria. Materials & methods: The lytic plasmid-dependent phage PRD1 and the multiresistance conferring plasmid RP4 in an Escherichia coli host were utilized to assess the genetic and phenotypic changes induced by combined phage and antibiotic selection. Results & conclusions: Resistance to PRD1 was always coupled with either completely lost or greatly reduced conjugation ability. Reversion to full conjugation efficiency was found to be rare…
High temperature and bacteriophages can indirectly select for bacterial pathogenicity in environmental reservoirs
2010
The coincidental evolution hypothesis predicts that traits connected to bacterial pathogenicity could be indirectly selected outside the host as a correlated response to abiotic environmental conditions or different biotic species interactions. To investigate this, an opportunistic bacterial pathogen, Serratia marcescens, was cultured in the absence and presence of the lytic bacteriophage PPV (Podoviridae) at 25°C and 37°C for four weeks (N = 5). At the end, we measured changes in bacterial phage-resistance and potential virulence traits, and determined the pathogenicity of all bacterial selection lines in the Parasemia plantaginis insect model in vivo. Selection at 37°C increased bacterial…
Genomic evolution of bacterial populations under coselection by antibiotics and phage
2017
Bacteria live in dynamic systems where selection pressures can alter rapidly, forcing adaptation to the prevailing conditions. In particular, bacteriophages and antibiotics of anthropogenic origin are major bacterial stressors in many environments. We previously observed that populations of the bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens SBW25 exposed to the lytic bacteriophage SBW25Φ2 and a noninhibitive concentration of the antibiotic streptomycin (coselection) achieved higher levels of phage resistance compared to populations exposed to the phage alone. In addition, the phage became extinct under coselection while remaining present in the phage alone environment. Further, phenotypic tests indicate…
Conjugation is necessary for a bacterial plasmid to survive under protozoan predation
2016
Horizontal gene transfer by conjugative plasmids plays a critical role in the evolution of antibiotic resistance. Interactions between bacteria and other organisms can affect the persistence and spread of conjugative plasmids. Here we show that protozoan predation increased the persistence and spread of the antibiotic resistance plasmid RP4 in populations of the opportunist bacterial pathogenSerratia marcescens. A conjugation-defective mutant plasmid was unable to survive under predation, suggesting that conjugative transfer is required for plasmid persistence under the realistic condition of predation. These results indicate that multi-trophic interactions can affect the maintenance of con…
Genomic evolution of bacterial populations under co-selection by antibiotics and phage
2017
Bacteria live in dynamic systems where selection pressures can alter rapidly, forcing adaptation to the prevailing conditions. In particular, bacteriophages and antibiotics of anthropogenic origin are major bacterial stressors in many environments. We previously observed that populations of the bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens SBW25 exposed to the lytic bacteriophage SBW25Φ2 and a noninhibitive concentration of the antibiotic streptomycin (coselection) achieved higher levels of phage resistance compared to populations exposed to the phage alone. In addition, the phage became extinct under coselection while remaining present in the phage alone environment. Further, phenotypic tests indicate…
Supplementary methods and results from Sublethal streptomycin concentrations and lytic bacteriophage together promote resistance evolution
2016
i) Estimating minimal inhibiting streptomycin concentration at the end of the 66-day experiment; ii) Testing for potential pleiotropy between streptomycin and phage resistance
Data from: Genomic evolution of bacterial populations under co-selection by antibiotics and phage
2016
Bacteria live in dynamic systems where selection pressures can alter rapidly, forcing adaptation to the prevailing conditions. In particular, bacteriophages and antibiotics of anthropogenic origin are major bacterial stressors in many environments. We previously observed that populations of the bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens SBW25 exposed to the lytic bacteriophage SBW25Φ2 and a non-inhibitive concentration of the antibiotic streptomycin (co-selection) achieved higher levels of phage resistance compared to populations exposed to the phage alone. In addition, the phage became extinct under co-selection while remaining present in the phage alone environment. Further, phenotypic tests indic…
Data from: Black Queen evolution and trophic interactions determine plasmid survival after the disruption of conjugation network
2019
Mobile genetic elements such as conjugative plasmids are responsible for antibiotic resistant phenotypes in many bacterial pathogens. The ability to conjugate, the presence of antibiotics and ecological interactions all have a notable role in the persistence of plasmids in bacterial populations. Here, we set out to investigate the contribution of these factors when the conjugation network was disturbed by a plasmid-dependent bacteriophage. Phage alone effectively caused the population to lose plasmids, thus rendering them susceptible to antibiotics. Leakiness of the antibiotic resistance mechanism allowing Black Queen evolution (i.e. race to the bottom) was a more significant factor over an…
Data from: Sublethal streptomycin concentrations and lytic bacteriophage together promote resistance evolution
2017
Sub-minimum inhibiting concentrations (sub-MICs) of antibiotics frequently occur in natural environments owing to wide-spread antibiotic leakage by human action. Even though the concentrations are very low, these sub-MICs have recently been shown to alter bacterial populations by selecting for antibiotic resistance and increasing the rate of adaptive evolution. However, studies are lacking on how these effects reverberate into key ecological interactions, such as bacteria–phage interactions. Previously, co-selection of bacteria by phages and antibiotic concentrations exceeding MICs has been hypothesized to decrease the rate of resistance evolution because of fitness costs associated with re…
Data from: Conjugation is necessary for a bacterial plasmid to survive under protozoan predation
2016
Horizontal gene transfer by conjugative plasmids plays a critical role in the evolution of antibiotic resistance. Interactions between bacteria and other organisms can affect the persistence and spread of conjugative plasmids. Here we show that protozoan predation increased the persistence and spread of the antibiotic resistance plasmid RP4 in populations of the opportunist bacterial pathogen Serratia marcescens. A conjugation-defective mutant plasmid was unable to survive under predation, suggesting that conjugative transfer is required for plasmid persistence under the realistic condition of predation. These results indicate that multi-trophic interactions can affect the maintenance of co…
High Temperature and Bacteriophages Can Indirectly Select for Bacterial Pathogenicity in Environmental Reservoirs
2011
The coincidental evolution hypothesis predicts that traits connected to bacterial pathogenicity could be indirectly selected outside the host as a correlated response to abiotic environmental conditions or different biotic species interactions. To investigate this, an opportunistic bacterial pathogen, Serratia marcescens, was cultured in the absence and presence of the lytic bacteriophage PPV (Podoviridae) at 25uC and 37uC for four weeks (N = 5). At the end, we measured changes in bacterial phage-resistance and potential virulence traits, and determined the pathogenicity of all bacterial selection lines in the Parasemia plantaginis insect model in vivo. Selection at 37uC increased bacterial…