{"doi":"10.7554/elife.81056","title":"Selection on plastic adherence leads to hyper-multicellular strains and incidental virulence in the budding yeast","abstract":"Many disease-causing microbes are not obligate pathogens; rather, they are environmental microbes taking advantage of an ecological opportunity. The existence of microbes whose life cycle does not require a host and are not normally pathogenic, yet are well-suited to host exploitation, is an evolutionary puzzle. One hypothesis posits that selection in the environment may favor traits that incidentally lead to pathogenicity and virulence, or serve as pre-adaptations for survival in a host. An example of such a trait is surface adherence. To experimentally test the idea of ‘accidental virulence’, replicate populations of Saccharomyces cerevisiae were evolved to attach to a plastic bead for hundreds of generations. Along with plastic adherence, two multicellular phenotypes— biofilm formation and flor formation— increased; another phenotype, pseudohyphal growth, responded to the nutrient limitation. Thus, experimental selection led to the evolution of highly-adherent, hyper-multicellular strains. Wax moth larvae injected with evolved hyper-multicellular strains were significantly more likely to die than those injected with evolved non-multicellular strains. Hence, selection on plastic adherence incidentally led to the evolution of enhanced multicellularity and increased virulence. Our results support the idea that selection for a trait beneficial in the open environment can inadvertently generate opportunistic, ‘accidental’ pathogens.","journal":"eLife","year":2023,"id":382671,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":3,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.943,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1149622,"name":"Juliana A Salcedo","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1040248,"name":"Matthew M Dungan","orcid":"0000-0002-2989-5982","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1149623,"name":"Despina V Mason","orcid":null,"position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1149624,"name":"Dulguun Myagmarsuren","orcid":null,"position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1149146,"name":"Helen A. Murphy","orcid":"0000-0002-4363-4543","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1149621,"name":"Luke I Ekdahl","orcid":null,"position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":106,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:17:20.969491Z","pmid":"37916911","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}