With a little help from my friends: cooperation can accelerate the rate of adaptive valley crossing

BMC Evolutionary Biology

Research Article

Ohad Lewin-Epstein¹  Lilach Hadany¹  Uri Obolski²  Yoav Ram³  Eran Even-Tov⁴ 

[1] Department of Molecular Biology and Ecology of Plants, Tel-Aviv University, 6997801, Tel Aviv, Israel;Department of Molecular Biology and Ecology of Plants, Tel-Aviv University, 6997801, Tel Aviv, Israel;Current address: Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK;Department of Molecular Biology and Ecology of Plants, Tel-Aviv University, 6997801, Tel Aviv, Israel;Present Address: Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA;Department of Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel;

关键词: Peak shift;    Adaptive landscape;    Cooperation;    Rugged fitness landscape;    Mathematical models/simulations;    Altruism;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12862-017-0983-2

 received in 2016-08-15, accepted in 2017-05-26,  发布年份 2017

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundNatural selection favors changes that lead to genotypes possessing high fitness. A conflict arises when several mutations are required for adaptation, but each mutation is separately deleterious. The process of a population evolving from a genotype encoding for a local fitness maximum to a higher fitness genotype is termed an adaptive peak shift.ResultsHere we suggest cooperative behavior as a factor that can facilitate adaptive peak shifts. We model cooperation in a public goods scenario, wherein each individual contributes resources that are later equally redistributed among all cooperating individuals. We use mathematical modeling and stochastic simulations to study the effect of cooperation on peak shifts in both panmictic and structured populations. Our results show that cooperation can substantially affect the rate of complex adaptation. Furthermore, we show that cooperation increases the population diversity throughout the peak shift process, thus increasing the robustness of the population to sudden environmental changes.ConclusionsWe provide a new explanation to adaptive valley crossing in natural populations and suggest that the long term evolution of a species depends on its social behavior.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© The Author(s). 2017

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