Shearing in flow environment promotes evolution of social behavior in microbial populations

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Abstract

How producers of public goods persist in microbial communities is a major question in evolutionary biology. Cooperation is evolutionarily unstable, since cheating strains can reproduce quicker and take over. Spatial structure has been shown to be a robust mechanism for the evolution of cooperation. Here we study how spatial assortment might emerge from native dynamics and show that fluid flow shear promotes cooperative behavior. Social structures arise naturally from our advection-diffusion-reaction model as self-reproducing Turing patterns. We computationally study the effects of fluid advection on these patterns as a mechanism to enable or enhance social behavior. Our central finding is that flow shear enables and promotes social behavior in microbes by increasing the group fragmentation rate and thereby limiting the spread of cheating strains. Regions of the flow domain with higher shear admit high cooperativity and large population density, whereas low shear regions are devoid of life due to opportunistic mutations.

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All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files

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Gurdip Uppal

Department of Physics, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, United States

For correspondence
guppal@nd.edu

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-3957-256X
Dervis Vural

Department of Physics, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, United States

For correspondence
dvural@nd.edu

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-0495-8086

Funding

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Contract No. HR0011-16-C0062)

Dervis Vural

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

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This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.