RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Public good diffusion limits microbial mutualism
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 013144
DO 10.1101/013144
A1 Rajita Menon
A1 Kirill S. Korolev
YR 2014
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/12/23/013144.abstract
AB Standard game theory cannot describe microbial interactions mediated by diffusible molecules. Nevertheless, we show that one can still model microbial dynamics using game theory with parameters renormalized by diffusion. Contrary to expectations, greater sharing of metabolites reduces the strength of cooperation and leads to species extinction via a nonequilibrium phase transition. We report analytic results for the critical diffusivity and the length scale of species intermixing. We also show that fitness nonlinearities suppress mutualism and favor the species producing slower nutrients.PACS numbers: 87.23.Cc, 87.23.Kg, 87.15.Zg, 64.60.ah