Understanding microbial cooperation
Name
Gore_Understanding microbial.pdf
Size
1.64 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
2d6c31628f1263383c7734974a173b24
Author(s)
Damore, James A.
Gore, Jeff
Date Issued
April 2012
Journal
Journal of Theoretical Biology
Publisher
Elsevier B.V.
Citation
Damore, James A., and Jeff Gore. “Understanding Microbial Cooperation.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 299 (April 2012): 31–41.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
The field of microbial cooperation has grown enormously over the last decade, leading to improved experimental techniques and a growing awareness of collective behavior in microbes. Unfortunately, many of our theoretical tools and concepts for understanding cooperation fail to take into account the peculiarities of the microbial world, namely strong selection strengths, unique population structure, and non-linear dynamics. Worse yet, common verbal arguments are often far removed from the math involved, leading to confusion and mistakes. Here, we review the general mathematical forms of Price's equation, Hamilton's rule, and multilevel selection as they are applied to microbes and provide some intuition on these otherwise abstract formulas. However, these sometimes overly general equations can lack specificity and predictive power, ultimately forcing us to advocate for more direct modeling techniques.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2011.03.008
