Destructive and constructive cheater suppression through quorum sensing
Moffett, A. S.; Thomas, P. J.; Hinczewski, M.; Eckford, A. W.
Show abstract
The evolutionary consequences of quorum sensing in regulating bacterial cooperation are not fully understood. In this study, we reveal unexpected consequences of regulating public good production through quorum sensing on bacterial population dynamics, showing that quorum sensing can be a collectively harmful alternative to unregulated production. We analyze a birth-death model of bacterial population dynamics accounting for public good production and the presence of non-producing cheaters. Our model demonstrates that when demographic noise is a factor, the consequences of controlling public good production according to quorum sensing depend on the cost of public good production and the presence of non-public fitness benefits. When public good production is inexpensive, quorum sensing is a destructive alternative to unconditional production, in terms of the mean population extinction time. When costs are higher, quorum sensing becomes a constructive strategy for the producing strain, both stabilizing cooperation and decreasing the risk of population extinction.
Matching journals
The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
Similar papers in this journal
- The Complex Interplay Between Risk Tolerance and the Spread of Infectious Diseases 97%
- Eco-evolutionary dynamics of pathogen immune-escape: deriving a population-level phylodynamic curve 97%
- Model-informed optimal allocation of limited resources to mitigate infectious disease outbreaks in societies at war 97%
"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.