Document information
Selfish and Altruistic Bacterial Populations Maximize Fitness Under Stress by Local Segregation
Correspondence: (Login to view email address)
- Delft University of Technology, Kavli Institute of Nanoscience
- Harvard University, FAS Center for Systems Biology
- Princeton Dniversity, Molecular Biology
- Harvard Medical School, Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics
- Princeton University, Physics
- Department of Physics, Princeton University
PDF (2.2 MB)
- Document Type:
- Manuscript
- Date:
- Received 23 March 2008 23:29 UTC; Posted 24 March 2008
- Subjects:
- Evolutionary Biology and Ecology, Genetics, Microbiology
- Abstract:
Landscapes in ecology have a profound influence on the adaption and evolution of competing populations for resources. We are interested in how altruistic populations survive in the presence of selfish individuals in a non-stirred, closed and complex nutrient landscape. Well-stirred (landscape-free) but closed environments have a depressing future when selfish individuals arise in a population, a fate known as the tragedy of the Commons. Over-exploitation of a well-stirred communal habitat by selfish individuals which do not follow rules of communal self-regulation ends up in the elimination (extinction) of both the original altruistic inhabitants and the selfish population. In the context of bacterial population, the Commons tragedy that occurs is the consumption of limited resources by the individuals, resulting in metabolic stressing of the bacteria and growth advantages to be gained by defection from a ``social contract” of altruistic cooperation. There is no avoidance of this tragedy and the collapse of an original altruistic wild-type population by an emergent selfish population in a well-stirred but closed environment is inevitable. However, there is a fundamental difference between resource exploitation in a well-stirred homogenous commons and in a heterogenous landscape of nutrients which is not stirred. We show here using a non-stirred nanofabricated habitat landscape that altruists and selfish bacteria can in fact coexist, that they can maintain phenotype diversity and avoid the tragedy of the Commons. This emergent spatial segregation of competing populations under stress greatly changes, we believe, our perception of the true sophistication of bacterial response to stress and competition, and has broad implications for the adaptive strategies of higher organisms under stress in complex environments.
Discussion
- Votes:
-
7 votes
- Comments:
-
1 comment
- (Login to share with a colleague)
Additional information
- License:
- This document is licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
- How to cite this document:
-
Keymer, Juan, Galajda, Peter, Malinverni, Juliana, Kolter, Roberto, Lambert, Guillaume, Liao, David, and Austin, Robert. Selfish and Altruistic Bacterial Populations Maximize Fitness Under Stress by Local Segregation. Available from Nature Precedings <http://hdl.handle.net/10101/npre.2008.1713.1> (2008)
- Version info:
-
Other versions of this document in Nature Precedings
None.
Other versions of this document elsewhere on the web
None known.
Raymond Hardy on 10 April 2008 17:55 UTC
There are a few typos in this document, but they do not seriously interfere with interpretation. The most important findings here relate to the failure of the game-theory simulation, and the importance of at least a minimal level of interdependence between “altruists” and “selfish” strains. I would like to have seen at least some mention of the implications of the rather dramatic effect of “stirring” for our species. Given our current transportation technologies and our penchant for using them, it is likely that our species now exists in a stirred niche quite different from the one(s) in which it originated.