Competition between species can drive public-goods cooperation within a species

Costly cooperative strategies are vulnerable to exploitation by cheats. Microbial studies have suggested that cooperation can be maintained in nature by mechanisms such as reciprocity, spatial structure and multi-level selection. So far, however, almost all laboratory experiments aimed at understanding cooperation have relied on studying a single species in isolation. In contrast, species in the wild live within complex communities where they interact with other species. Little effort has focused on understanding the effect of interspecies competition on the evolution of cooperation within a species. We test this relationship by using sucrose metabolism of budding yeast as a model cooperative system. We find that when co-cultured with a bacterial competitor, yeast populations become more cooperative compared to isolated populations. We show that this increase in cooperation within yeast is mainly driven by resource competition imposed by the bacterial competitor. A similar increase in cooperation is observed i

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2012

Author dc:creator

• Celiker, Hasan

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Jeff Gore.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/70790

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/70790