Related papers: On the possibility of engineering social evolution…
In microbial communities, each species often has multiple, distinct phenotypes, but studies of ecological stability have largely ignored this subpopulation structure. Here, we show that such implicit averaging over phenotypes leads to…
The evolution of cooperation in social dilemmas in structured populations has been studied extensively in recent years. Whereas many theoretical studies have found that a heterogeneous network of contacts favors cooperation, the impact of…
Decades of scientific inquiry have sought to understand how evolution fosters cooperation, a concept seemingly at odds with the belief that evolution should produce rational, self-interested individuals. Most previous work has focused on…
Environmental changes greatly influence the evolution of populations. Here, we study the dynamics of a population of two strains, one growing slightly faster than the other, competing for resources in a time-varying binary environment…
We study the combined influence of selection and random fluctuations on the evolutionary dynamics of two-strategy ("cooperation" and "defection") games in populations comprising cooperation facilitators. The latter are individuals that…
We study effects of strategy-dependent time delays on equilibria of evolving populations. It is well known that time delays may cause oscillations in dynamical systems. Here we report a novel behavior. We show that microscopic models of…
New automated and high-throughput methods allow the manipulation and selection of numerous bacterial populations. In this manuscript we are interested in the neutral diversity patterns that emerge from such a setup in which many bacterial…
The rich set of interactions between individuals in the society results in complex community structure, capturing highly connected circles of friends, families, or professional cliques in a social network. Thanks to frequent changes in the…
Mobile genetic elements like conjugative plasmids play a crucial role in shaping the genetic content and population dynamics of bacterial species. Bacterial populations often contain not one, but multiple co-circulating MGEs, which modify…
Societies consisting of cooperative individuals seem to require for their continuing success that defectors be policed. The precise connection between punishers and benefits, population structure, and division of labour, however, remains…
The self-organization of microbial ecosystems involves a large variety of mechanisms, ranging from biochemical signaling to population dynamics. Among these, the role of motility regulation has been little studied, despite the importance of…
Cooperation is ubiquitous in biological and social systems. Previous studies revealed that a preference toward similar appearance promotes cooperation, a phenomenon called tag-mediated cooperation or communitarian cooperation. This effect…
Models based on surfactant driven instabilities have been employed to describe pattern formation by swarming bacteria. However, by definition, such models cannot account for the effect of bacterial sensing and decision making. Here we…
Bacteria can chemotactically migrate up attractant gradients by controlling run-and-tumble motility patterns. In addition to this well-known chemotactic behaviour, several soil and marine bacterial species perform chemokinesis: they adjust…
Cooperation is a widespread natural phenomenon yet current evolutionary thinking is dominated by the paradigm of selfish competition. Recent advanced in many fronts of Biology and Non-linear Physics are helping to bring cooperation to its…
Antimicrobial resistance to drugs (AMR), a global threat to human and animal health, is often regarded as resulting from cooperative behaviour. Moreover, microbes generally evolve in volatile environments that, together with demographic…
Antibiotic resistance is a growing public health problem. To gain a fundamental understanding of resistance evolution, a combination of systematic experimental and theoretical approaches is required. Evolution experiments combined with…
Addressing both natural and societal challenges requires collective cooperation. Studies on collective-risk social dilemmas have shown that individual decisions are influenced by the perceived risk of collective failure. However, existing…
Natural selection and random drift are competing phenomena for explaining the evolution of populations. Combining a highly fit mutant with a population structure that improves the odds that the mutant spreads through the whole population…
Evolutionary algorithms have been successfully applied to a variety of optimisation problems in stationary environments. However, many real world optimisation problems are set in dynamic environments where the success criteria shifts…