Cooperative success in epithelial public goods games

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 wellmixed 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.

The role of evolutionary game theory in spatial and non-spatial models of the survival of cooperation in cancer: a review

“…To better understand the success of cooperation on realistic simple epithelia, Renton & Page studied both the Prisoner’s Dilemma [124] and sigmoid-benefit public goods games [125] on Voronoi tessellations. They found that the crucial mechanism required for cooperation to succeed was the spatial decoupling of birth and death, with nuclei moving under the forces created by cells vanishing and appearing anywhere in the population.…”

Ecology and games in cancer: new insights into the disease

“…This mathematical tool has also been applied to analyze biological problems, and lately to explore the complexity of cancer. The hawk-dove game 19 , the prisoner’s dilemma 20 , coordination games 21 , and multiplayer public good games such as the volunteer’s dilemma 22 , for example, are different theoretical scenarios that have been applied to cancer analysis in recent years.…”