Cooperative success in epithelial public goods games

TL;DR

This study models cooperation among epithelial cells producing diffusible growth factors as public goods games, revealing that population structure and global updating significantly enhance cooperative success, with implications for understanding cancer cell dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a Voronoi tessellation model for epithelial cell cooperation, highlighting the impact of global updating on cooperative success compared to traditional models.

Findings

Global updating promotes cooperation more than local updating.

Structured populations require lower incentives for cooperation.

Qualitative behavior similar between well-mixed and Voronoi models.

Abstract

Cancer cells obtain mutations which rely on the production of diffusible growth factors to confer a fitness benefit. These mutations can be considered cooperative, and studied as public goods games within the framework of evolutionary game theory. The population structure, benefit function and update rule all influence the evolutionary success of cooperators. We model the evolution of cooperation in epithelial cells using the Voronoi tessellation model. Unlike traditional evolutionary graph theory, this allows us to implement global updating, for which birth and death events are spatially decoupled. We compare, for a sigmoid benefit function, the conditions for cooperation to be favoured and/or beneficial for well mixed and structured populations. We find that when population structure is combined with global updating, cooperation is more successful than if there were local updating or the population were well-mixed. Interestingly, the qualitative behaviour for the well-mixed population and the Voronoi tessellation model is remarkably similar, but the latter case requires significantly lower incentives to ensure cooperation.