1Department of Integrated Mathematical Oncology, H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute, Tampa, FL 33629 USA.
2Department of Mathematical Sciences, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, SE-412 96 Sweden.
Commun Biol. 2019 Feb 5;2:53. doi: 10.1038/s42003-019-0299-4. eCollection 2019.
An evolutionary game emerges when a subset of individuals incur costs to provide benefits to all individuals. Public goods games (PGG) cover the essence of such dilemmas in which cooperators are prone to exploitation by defectors. We model the population dynamics of a non-linear PGG and consider density-dependence on the global level, while the game occurs within local neighborhoods. At low cooperation, increases in the public good provide increasing returns. At high cooperation, increases provide diminishing returns. This mechanism leads to diverse evolutionarily stable strategies, including monomorphic and polymorphic populations, and neighborhood-size-driven state changes, resulting in hysteresis between equilibria. Stochastic or strategy-dependent variations in neighborhood sizes favor coexistence by destabilizing monomorphic states. We integrate our model with experiments of cancer cell growth and confirm that our framework describes PGG dynamics observed in cellular populations. Our findings advance the understanding of how neighborhood-size effects in PGG shape the dynamics of growing populations.
当一部分个体为所有个体提供利益而付出代价时，就会出现进化博弈。公共物品博弈 (PGG) 涵盖了这种困境的本质，即合作者容易被叛徒利用。我们对非线性 PGG 的种群动态进行建模，并考虑全局水平上的密度依赖性，而博弈则发生在局部邻里之间。在低合作度下，公共物品的增加会带来递增回报。在高合作度下，增加会带来递减回报。这种机制导致了多样化的进化稳定策略，包括单态和多态群体，以及由邻里大小驱动的状态变化，导致平衡点之间出现滞后。邻里大小的随机或策略依赖性变化通过破坏单态状态有利于共存。我们将我们的模型与癌细胞生长的实验相结合，并证实我们的框架描述了细胞群体中观察到的 PGG 动态。我们的发现提高了对邻里大小效应对 PGG 塑造增长种群动态的影响的理解。
