Print Email Facebook Twitter Spatial structure facilitates cooperation in a social dilemma: Empirical evidence from a bacterial community Title Spatial structure facilitates cooperation in a social dilemma: Empirical evidence from a bacterial community Author Hol, F.J.H. Galajda, P. Nagy, K. Woolthuis, R.G. Dekker, C. Keymer, J.E. Faculty Applied Sciences Department Bionanoscience Date 2013-10-22 Abstract Cooperative organisms are ubiquitous in nature, despite their vulnerability to exploitation by cheaters. Although numerous theoretical studies suggest that spatial structure is critical for cooperation to persist, the spatial ecology of microbial cooperation remains largely unexplored experimentally. By tracking the community dynamics of cooperating (rpoS wild-type) and cheating (rpoS mutant) Escherichia coli in well-mixed flasks and microfabricated habitats, we demonstrate that spatial structure stabilizes coexistence between wild-type and mutant and thus facilitates cooperator maintenance. We develop a method to interpret our experimental results in the context of game theory, and show that the game wild-type and mutant bacteria play in an unstructured environment changes markedly over time, and eventually obeys a prisoner’s dilemma leading to cheater dominance. In contrast, when wild-type and mutant E. coli co-inhabit a spatially-structured habitat, cooperators and cheaters coexist at intermediate frequencies. Our findings show that even in microhabitats lacking patchiness or spatial heterogeneities in resource availability, surface growth allows cells to form multi-cellular aggregates, yielding a self-structured community in which cooperators persist. To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:36ee4a81-d112-4634-8ac1-44ac23f82609 DOI https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0077042 Publisher Public Library of Science PLOS ISSN 1932-6203 Source PloS ONE, 8 (10), 2013 Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type journal article Rights © 2013 Hol et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Files PDF journal.pone.0077042.pdf 937.69 KB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:36ee4a81-d112-4634-8ac1-44ac23f82609/datastream/OBJ/view