71 research outputs found
Emergence of Spatial Structure in Cell Groups and the Evolution of Cooperation
On its own, a single cell cannot exert more than a microscopic influence on its immediate surroundings. However, via strength in numbers and the expression of cooperative phenotypes, such cells can enormously impact their environments. Simple cooperative phenotypes appear to abound in the microbial world, but explaining their evolution is challenging because they are often subject to exploitation by rapidly growing, non-cooperative cell lines. Population spatial structure may be critical for this problem because it influences the extent of interaction between cooperative and non-cooperative individuals. It is difficult for cooperative cells to succeed in competition if they become mixed with non-cooperative cells, which can exploit the public good without themselves paying a cost. However, if cooperative cells are segregated in space and preferentially interact with each other, they may prevail. Here we use a multi-agent computational model to study the origin of spatial structure within growing cell groups. Our simulations reveal that the spatial distribution of genetic lineages within these groups is linked to a small number of physical and biological parameters, including cell growth rate, nutrient availability, and nutrient diffusivity. Realistic changes in these parameters qualitatively alter the emergent structure of cell groups, and thereby determine whether cells with cooperative phenotypes can locally and globally outcompete exploitative cells. We argue that cooperative and exploitative cell lineages will spontaneously segregate in space under a wide range of conditions and, therefore, that cellular cooperation may evolve more readily than naively expected
Universality in Bacterial Colonies
The emergent spatial patterns generated by growing bacterial colonies have
been the focus of intense study in physics during the last twenty years. Both
experimental and theoretical investigations have made possible a clear
qualitative picture of the different structures that such colonies can exhibit,
depending on the medium on which they are growing. However, there are
relatively few quantitative descriptions of these patterns. In this paper, we
use a mechanistically detailed simulation framework to measure the scaling
exponents associated with the advancing fronts of bacterial colonies on hard
agar substrata, aiming to discern the universality class to which the system
belongs. We show that the universal behavior exhibited by the colonies can be
much richer than previously reported, and we propose the possibility of up to
four different sub-phases within the medium-to-high nutrient concentration
regime. We hypothesize that the quenched disorder that characterizes one of
these sub-phases is an emergent property of the growth and division of bacteria
competing for limited space and nutrients.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figure
The impact of resource dependence of the mechanisms of life on the spatial population dynamics of an in silico microbial community
Biodiversity has a critical impact on ecosystem functionality and stability, and thus the current biodiversity crisis has motivated many studies of the mechanisms that sustain biodiversity, a notable example being non-transitive or cyclic competition. We therefore extend existing microscopic models of communities with cyclic competition by incorporating resource dependence in demographic processes, characteristics of natural systems often oversimplified or overlooked by modellers. The spatially explicit nature of our individual-based model of three interacting species results in the formation of stable spatial structures, which have significant effects on community functioning, in agreement with experimental observations of pattern formation in microbial communities. Published by AIP Publishing
The fate of cooperation during range expansions
Cooperation is beneficial for the species as a whole, but, at the level of an
individual, defection pays off. Natural selection is then expected to favor
defectors and eliminate cooperation. This prediction is in stark contrast with
the abundance of cooperation at all levels of biological systems: from cells
cooperating to form a biofilm or an organism to ecosystems and human societies.
Several explanations have been proposed to resolve this paradox, including
direct reciprocity, kin, and group selection. However, our work builds upon an
observation that selection on cooperators might depend both on their relative
frequency in the population and on the population density. We find that this
feedback between the population and evolutionary dynamics can substantially
increase the frequency of cooperators at the front of an expanding population,
and can even lead to a splitting of cooperators from defectors. After
splitting, only cooperators colonize new territories, while defectors slowly
invade them from behind. Since range expansions are very common in nature, our
work provides a new explanation of the maintenance of cooperation
The Black Queen Hypothesis: Evolution of Dependencies through Adaptive Gene Loss
Reductive genomic evolution, driven by genetic drift, is common in endosymbiotic bacteria. Genome reduction is less common in free-living organisms, but it has occurred in the numerically dominant open-ocean bacterioplankton Prochlorococcus and “Candidatus Pelagibacter,” and in these cases the reduction appears to be driven by natural selection rather than drift. Gene loss in free-living organisms may leave them dependent on cooccurring microbes for lost metabolic functions. We present the Black Queen Hypothesis (BQH), a novel theory of reductive evolution that explains how selection leads to such dependencies; its name refers to the queen of spades in the game Hearts, where the usual strategy is to avoid taking this card. Gene loss can provide a selective advantage by conserving an organism’s limiting resources, provided the gene’s function is dispensable. Many vital genetic functions are leaky, thereby unavoidably producing public goods that are available to the entire community. Such leaky functions are thus dispensable for individuals, provided they are not lost entirely from the community. The BQH predicts that the loss of a costly, leaky function is selectively favored at the individual level and will proceed until the production of public goods is just sufficient to support the equilibrium community; at that point, the benefit of any further loss would be offset by the cost. Evolution in accordance with the BQH thus generates “beneficiaries” of reduced genomic content that are dependent on leaky “helpers,” and it may explain the observed nonuniversality of prototrophy, stress resistance, and other cellular functions in the microbial world
Range expansion with mutation and selection: dynamical phase transition in a two-species Eden model
The colonization of unoccupied territory by invading species, known as range expansion, is a spatially heterogeneous non-equilibrium growth process. We introduce a two-species Eden growth model to analyze the interplay between uni-directional (irreversible) mutations and selection at the expanding front. While the evolutionary dynamics leads to coalescence of both wild-type and mutant clusters, the non-homogeneous advance of the colony results in a rough front. We show that roughening and domain dynamics are strongly coupled, resulting in qualitatively altered bulk and front properties. For beneficial mutations the front is quickly taken over by mutants and growth proceeds Eden-like. In contrast, if mutants grow slower than wild-types, there is an antagonism between selection pressure against mutants and growth by the merging of mutant domains with an ensuing absorbing state phase transition to an all-mutant front. We find that surface roughening has a marked effect on the critical properties of the absorbing state phase transition. While reference models, which keep the expanding front flat, exhibit directed percolation critical behavior, the exponents of the two-species Eden model strongly deviate from it. In turn, the mutation-selection process induces an increased surface roughness with exponents distinct from that of the classical Eden model
Evolution at the edge of expanding populations
Predicting evolution of expanding populations is critical to control
biological threats such as invasive species and cancer metastasis. Expansion is
primarily driven by reproduction and dispersal, but nature abounds with
examples of evolution where organisms pay a reproductive cost to disperse
faster. When does selection favor this 'survival of the fastest?' We searched
for a simple rule, motivated by evolution experiments where swarming bacteria
evolved into an hyperswarmer mutant which disperses faster but
pays a growth cost of to make many copies of its flagellum. We
analyzed a two-species model based on the Fisher equation to explain this
observation: the population expansion rate () results from an interplay of
growth () and dispersal () and is independent of the carrying capacity:
. A mutant can take over the edge only if its expansion rate
() exceeds the expansion rate of the established species (); this
simple condition () determines the maximum cost in slower growth
that a faster mutant can pay and still be able to take over. Numerical
simulations and time-course experiments where we tracked evolution by imaging
bacteria suggest that our findings are general: less favorable conditions delay
but do not entirely prevent the success of the fastest. Thus, the expansion
rate defines a traveling wave fitness, which could be combined with trade-offs
to predict evolution of expanding populations
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