Labour sharing promotes coexistence in atrazine degrading bacterial communities

Microbial communities exert a pivotal role in the biodegradation of xenobiotics including pesticides1. In the case of atrazine, multiple studies have shown that its degradation involved a consortia rather than a single species2,3,4,5, but little is known about how interdependency between the species composing the consortium is set up. The Black Queen Hypothesis (BQH) formalized theoretically the conditions leading to the evolution of dependency between species6: members of the community called helpers provide publicly common goods obtained from the costly degradation of a compound, while others called beneficiaries take advantage of the public goods, but lose access to the primary resource through adaptive degrading gene loss. Here, we test whether liquid media supplemented with the herbicide atrazine could support coexistence of bacterial species through BQH mechanisms. We observed the establishment of dependencies between species through atrazine degrading gene loss. Labour sharing between members of the consortium led to coexistence of multiple species on a single resource and improved atrazine degradation potential. Until now, pesticide degradation has not been approached from an evolutionary perspective under the BQH framework. We provide here an evolutionary explanation that might invite researchers to consider microbial consortia, rather than single isolated species, as an optimal strategy for isolation of xenobiotics degraders. Also, we anticipate that future research should focus on the bioaugmentation with stabilized and tightly structured microbial degrading consortia as an effective solution for in situ bioremediation of sites polluted with recalcitrant compounds.