The Emergence of Cooperation from a Single Mutant during Microbial Life-Cycles

Abstract

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 was already reached. However, the question how cooperation can emerge from a single mutant, which cannot rely on a benefit provided by other cooperators, is still puzzling. Here, we investigate this question for a well-defined but generic situation based on typical life-cycles of microbial populations where individuals regularly form new colonies followed by growth phases. We analyze two evolutionary mechanisms favoring cooperative behavior and study their strength depending on the inoculation size and the length of a life-cycle. In particular, we find that population bottlenecks followed by exponential growth phases strongly increase the survival and fixation probabilities of a single cooperator in a free-riding population.

main text: 14 pages, 5 figures; supplement: 4 pages, figures

References in corpus (6)

• Stochastic Dynamics of Invasion and Fixation
• Coevolutionary Dynamics: From Finite to Infinite Populations
• Fixation of strategies for an evolutionary game in finite populations
• Growth dynamics and the evolution of cooperation in microbial populations
• Evolutionary game theory in growing populations
• The edge of neutral evolution in social dilemmas

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Evolution of a Fluctuating Population in a Randomly Switching Environment
• Evolutionary Dynamics in a Varying Environment: Continuous versus Discrete Noise
• Coexistence of Competing Microbial Strains under Twofold Environmental Variability and Demographic Fluctuations
• Emergent cooperative behavior in transient compartments
• Fixation and extinction in time-fluctuating spatially structured metapopulations
• Game-environment feedback dynamics in growing population: Effect of finite carrying capacity