Competition for resources can reshape the evolutionary properties of spatial structure.

bioRxiv

Computational Biology Department, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

Published: April 2024

AI Article Synopsis

  • Many ecosystems can be modeled as networks where nodes are individuals or groups and links represent their interactions.
  • Previous evolutionary models on networks didn't consider the differences in ecological niches and their effects.
  • This study merges resource competition theory with evolutionary graph theory and finds that ecological competition can change the influence of networks on the evolution of harmful mutants, revealing complex relationships based on niche overlap.

Article Abstract

Many evolving ecosystems have spatial structures that can be conceptualized as networks, with nodes representing individuals or homogeneous subpopulations and links the patterns of interaction and replacement between them. Prior models of evolution on networks do not take ecological niche differences and eco-evolutionary interplay into account. Here, we combine a resource competition model with evolutionary graph theory to study how heterogeneous topological structure shapes evolutionary dynamics under global frequency-dependent ecological interactions. We find that the addition of ecological competition for resources can produce a reversal of roles between amplifier and suppressor networks for deleterious mutants entering the population. Moreover, we show that this effect is a non-linear function of ecological niche overlap and discuss intuition for the observed dynamics using simulations and analytical approximations.

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11042312PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/2024.04.13.589370DOI Listing

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