ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2015
The emergence of cooperation from a single mutant during microbial life cycles.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Slow spatial migration can help eradicate cooperative antimicrobial resistance in time-varying environments.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Strong segregation promotes self-destructive cooperation.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Evolution-proof inhibitors of public good cooperation: a screening strategy inspired by social evolution theory.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2022Article
- Coexistence and cooperation in structured habitats.BMC ecology · 2020Article
- Article
- Eco-evolutionary dynamics of a population with randomly switching carrying capacity.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2018Article
- Interactions mediated by a public good transiently increase cooperativity in growing Pseudomonas putida metapopulations.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Non-Selective Evolution of Growing Populations.PloS one · 2015Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cooperative behaviour is widespread in nature, even though cooperating individuals always run the risk of being 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 analyse two evolutionary mechanisms favouring cooperative behaviour 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.
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