Related papers: Cooperation in Microbial Populations: Theory and E…

Bacterial communities have rich social lives. A well-established interaction involves the exchange of a public good in Pseudomonas populations, where the iron-scavenging compound pyoverdine, synthesized by some cells, is shared with the…

Microbes providing public goods are widespread in nature despite running the risk of being exploited by free-riders. However, the precise ecological factors supporting cooperation are still puzzling. Following recent experiments, we…

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.…

Cooperative behavior is widespread in nature, even though cooperating individuals always run the risk to be exploited by free-riders. Population structure effectively promotes cooperation given that a threshold in the level of cooperation…

Social dilemmas are an integral part of social interactions. Cooperative actions, ranging from secreting extra-cellular products in microbial populations to donating blood in humans, are costly to the actor and hence create an incentive to…

In biology, the evolution of increasingly cooperative groups has shaped the history of life. Genes collaborate in the control of cells; cells efficiently divide tasks to produce cohesive multicellular individuals; individual members of…

Cancer cells obtain mutations which rely on the production of diffusible growth factors to confer a fitness benefit. These mutations can be considered cooperative, and studied as public goods games within the framework of evolutionary game…

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…

Many real systems are strongly characterized by collective cooperative phenomena whose existence and properties still need a satisfactory explanation. Coherently with their collective nature, they call for new and more accurate descriptions…

The emergence and maintenance of cooperative behavior is a fascinating topic in evolutionary biology and social science. The public goods game (PGG) is a paradigm for exploring cooperative behavior. In PGG, the total resulting payoff is…

Evolutionary transitions among ecological interactions are widely known, although their detailed dynamics remain absent for most population models. Adaptive dynamics has been used to illustrate how the parameters of population models might…

Community organization permeates both social and biological complex systems. To study its interplay with behavior emergence, we model mobile structured populations with multiplayer interactions. We derive general analytical methods for…

Cooperation arises in nature at every scale, from within cells to entire ecosystems. In the framework of evolutionary game theory, public goods games (PGGs) are used to analyse scenarios where individuals can cooperate or defect, and can…

Bacterial quorum sensing is the communication that takes place between bacteria as they secrete certain molecules into the intercellular medium that later get absorbed by the secreting cells themselves and by others. Depending on cell…

Many species of microbes cooperate by producing public goods from which they collectively benefit. However, these populations are under the risk of being taken over by cheating mutants that do not contribute to the pool of public goods.…

Theoretical models suggest that social networks influence the evolution of cooperation, but to date there have been few experimental studies. Observational data suggest that a wide variety of behaviors may spread in human social networks,…

We introduce various models for cellulose bio-degradation by micro-organisms. Those models rely on complex chemical mechanisms, involve the structure of the cellulose chains and are allowed to depend on the phenotypical traits of the…

Cooperation and competition coexist and coevolve in natural and social systems. Cooperation generates resources, which in turn, drive non-cooperative competition to secure individual shares. How this complex interplay between cooperation…

The evolution of cooperation often depends upon population structure, yet nearly all models of cooperation implicitly assume that this structure remains static. This is a simplifying assumption, because most organisms possess genetic traits…

While the benefits of common and public goods are shared, they tend to be scarce when contributions are provided voluntarily. Failure to cooperate in the provision or preservation of these goods is fundamental to sustainability challenges,…