Columbia University Irving Medical Center, 630 West 168th Street, New York, NY, 10032, USA.
J Math Biol. 2021 Jan 21;82(1-2):5. doi: 10.1007/s00285-021-01558-6.
Natural selection has shaped the evolution of cells and multi-cellular organisms such that social cooperation can often be preferred over an individualistic approach to metabolic regulation. This paper extends a framework for dynamic metabolic resource allocation based on the maximum entropy principle to spatiotemporal models of metabolism with cooperation. Much like the maximum entropy principle encapsulates 'bet-hedging' behaviour displayed by organisms dealing with future uncertainty in a fluctuating environment, its cooperative extension describes how individuals adapt their metabolic resource allocation strategy to further accommodate limited knowledge about the welfare of others within a community. The resulting theory explains why local regulation of metabolic cross-feeding can fulfil a community-wide metabolic objective if individuals take into consideration an ensemble measure of total population performance as the only form of global information. The latter is likely supplied by quorum sensing in microbial systems or signalling molecules such as hormones in multi-cellular eukaryotic organisms.
自然选择塑造了细胞和多细胞生物的进化，使得社会合作通常可以优先于个体主义的代谢调节方法。本文将基于最大熵原理的动态代谢资源分配框架扩展到具有合作关系的时空代谢模型。就像最大熵原理包含了生物体在波动环境中应对未来不确定性时表现出的“风险分散”行为一样，其合作扩展描述了个体如何调整其代谢资源分配策略，以进一步适应对社区内他人福利的有限了解。由此产生的理论解释了为什么如果个体将总体人口表现的集合度量作为唯一的全局信息形式考虑在内，那么局部代谢交叉喂养的调节就可以实现社区范围的代谢目标。在后一种情况下，微生物系统中的群体感应或多细胞真核生物中的激素等信号分子可能会提供这种信息。
