Related papers: Public good diffusion limits microbial mutualism
Without mutation and migration, evolutionary dynamics ultimately leads to the extinction of all but one species. Such fixation processes are well understood and can be characterized analytically with methods from statistical physics.…
Understanding how biological organisms make decisions is of fundamental importance in understanding behavior. Such an understanding within evolutionary game theory so far has been sought by appealing to bounded rationality. Here, we present…
Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…
The evolution of cooperation has been a perennial problem in evolutionary biology because cooperation can be undermined by selfish cheaters who gain an advantage in the short run, while compromising the long-term viability of the…
The ways in which an innovation (e.g., new behaviour, idea, technology, product) diffuses among people can determine its success or failure. In this paper, we address the problem of diffusion of innovations over multiplex social networks…
People's cooperation in adopting protective measures is effective in epidemic control and creates herd immunity as a public good. Similarly, the presence of an epidemic is a driving factor for the formation and improvement of cooperation.…
We consider a simple information-theoretic model of communication, in which two species of bacteria have the option of exchanging information about their environment, thereby improving their chances of survival. For this purpose, we model a…
We compare and contrast the long-time dynamical properties of two individual-based models of biological coevolution. Selection occurs via multispecies, stochastic population dynamics with reproduction probabilities that depend nonlinearly…
High-throughput experimental techniques and bioinformatics tools make it possible to obtain reconstructions of the metabolism of microbial species. Combined with mathematical frameworks such as flux balance analysis, which assumes that…
It is known that the competitive exclusion principle holds for a large kind of models involving several species competing for a single resource in an homogeneous environment. Various works indicate that the coexistence is possible in an…
We demonstrate diversification rather than optimisation for highly interacting organisms in a well mixed biological system by means of a simple model and reference to experiment, and find the cause to be the complex network of interactions…
Many socio-economic and biological processes can be modeled as systems of interacting individuals. The behaviour of such systems can be often described within game-theoretic models. In these lecture notes, we introduce fundamental concepts…
Microbial populations exhibit a broad spectrum of nutrient utilization strategies, ranging from strategies utilizing diverse nutrients, called "generalists," to those being highly adapted to specific nutrients, called "specialists." The…
When individuals interact in groups, the evolution of cooperation is traditionally modeled using the framework of public goods games. These models often assume that the return of the public good depends linearly on the fraction of…
Models in evolutionary game theory traditionally assume symmetric interactions in homogeneous environments. Here, we consider populations evolving in a heterogeneous environment, which consists of patches of different qualities that are…
Recent work suggests that cross-feeding -- the secretion and consumption of metabolic biproducts by microbes -- is essential for understanding microbial ecology. Yet how cross-feeding and competition combine to give rise to ecosystem-level…
We analyze a reaction-diffusion system describing the growth of microbial species in a model of flocculation type that arises in biology. Existence of global classical positive solutions is proved under general growth assumptions, with…
Despite major environmental and genetic differences, microbial metabolic networks are known to generate consistent physiological outcomes across vastly different organisms. This remarkable robustness suggests that, at least in bacteria,…
Game theory ideas provide a useful framework for studying evolutionary dynamics in a well-mixed environment. This approach, however, typically enforces a strictly fixed overall population size, deemphasizing natural growth processes. We…
Understanding the emergence and sustainability of cooperation is a fundamental problem in evolutionary biology and is frequently studied by the framework of evolutionary game theory. A very powerful mechanism to promote cooperation is…