Cooperation in yeast sucrose metabolism

From Q-bio

Understanding the conditions required for the initiation and maintenance of cooperation is a classic problem in evolutionary biology. Yeast digest sucrose using the enzyme invertase in such a way that a majority of the useable product is lost to the environment and consumed by other cells. We have demonstrated experimentally that this results in cooperative growth in sucrose cultures. We have developed a simple model that explains the cooperative interaction and that accurately predicts the outcome of competition experiments in a variety of conditions between the wildtype cooperator strain and a cheater strain that does not produce invertase.