Evolution of maintenance of cooperation in sucrose (public-good driven system).

The phenomenon of cooperation is prevalent in nature and found at all levels of life. In microbial communities, some groups of cells exhibit cooperative behaviour by producing costly extracellular resources that are freely available to others, and these resources are referred to as public goods. For cooperators to survive cheating and thrive in nature, they should have evolved some survival strategies. Therefore, to understand the adaptation of Saccharomyces cerevisiae cooperators in sucrose, we performed 200 generations of coevolution of cheaters and cooperators in sucrose to study how cooperators thrive in the presence of cheaters.

合作现象在自然界中广泛存在，且贯穿生命的所有层级。在微生物群落中，部分细胞群通过产生需付出高昂成本的胞外资源来展现合作行为，这类资源可被其他个体免费获取，被称为公共物品（public goods）。为使合作者能够在欺骗者的存在下存活并在自然界中繁衍，它们应当演化出了相应的生存策略。因此，为探究酿酒酵母（Saccharomyces cerevisiae）合作者在蔗糖环境中的适应性机制，我们在蔗糖体系中开展了欺骗者与合作者共200代的共演化实验，以研究合作者在欺骗者存在的条件下如何实现兴盛存续。