Emergence of Spatial Structure in Cell Groups and the Evolution of Cooperation

By Carey D. Nadell, Kevin R. Foster, João B. Xavier. PLoS Comput. Biol., 2010

351 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Genetics, Global and Planetary Change, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/66d1c3cac27fd7d7cbe2b07303c4bacd5d7998ec

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Genetics

1. Nick W. Smith
2. Paul R. Shorten
3. Costas D. Maranas
4. Ali R. Zomorrodi
5. N. Roy
6. E. Altermann
7. W. McNabb

In Global and Planetary Change

1. Costas D. Maranas
2. Ali R. Zomorrodi

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Nick W. Smith
2. Paul R. Shorten
3. Costas D. Maranas
4. Ali R. Zomorrodi
5. N. Roy
6. E. Altermann
7. W. McNabb

Citations in the corpus

• The Classification and Evolution of Bacterial Cross-Feeding (2019, methodology): “Their definition of cooperation—action that is beneficial to the recipient regardless of its effect on the donor—is used by many (Velicer and Vos, 2009; Nadell et al., 2010; Wintermute and Silver, 2010a; Damore and Gore, 2012; Sachs and Hollowell, 2012; Momeni et al., 2013).”
• The Black Queen Hypothesis: Evolution of Dependencies through Adaptive Gene Loss (2012, background): “Previous studies have demonstrated that spatial structure plays a key role in the evolution of certain microbial phenotypes, including secretion of growth factors (34) and allelopathic compounds (35), that impose costs on some individuals Opinion/Hypothesis”
• OptCom: A Multi-Level Optimization Framework for the Metabolic Modeling and Analysis of Microbial Communities (2012, methodology): “A wide range of methods beyond flux balance analysis have been used to model microbial communities [34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41, 42,43,44,45].”