Spatial dilemmas of diffusible public goods

eLife

Jeff Gore¹  Benjamin Allen²  Martin A Nowak³ 

[1] Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Harvard University, Cambridge, United States;Department of Mathematics, Emmanuel College, Boston, United States;Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, United States;

关键词: cooperation;    microbial evolution;    evolutionary graph theory;    social multiplier;   

DOI  :  10.7554/eLife.01169

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

The emergence of cooperation is a central question in evolutionary biology. Microorganisms often cooperate by producing a chemical resource (a public good) that benefits other cells. The sharing of public goods depends on their diffusion through space. Previous theory suggests that spatial structure can promote evolution of cooperation, but the diffusion of public goods introduces new phenomena that must be modeled explicitly. We develop an approach where colony geometry and public good diffusion are described by graphs. We find that the success of cooperation depends on a simple relation between the benefits and costs of the public good, the amount retained by a producer, and the average amount retained by each of the producer’s neighbors. These quantities are derived as analytic functions of the graph topology and diffusion rate. In general, cooperation is favored for small diffusion rates, low colony dimensionality, and small rates of decay of the public good.

【 授权许可】

Unknown