Hernández-Navarro, L. orcid.org/0000-0002-7272-7597, Asker, M. orcid.org/0009-0003-5548-5535 and Mobilia, M. orcid.org/0000-0002-1424-567X (2024) Eco-evolutionary dynamics of cooperative antimicrobial resistance in a population of fluctuating volume and size. Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical, 57 (26). 265003. ISSN 1751-8113
Abstract
Antimicrobial resistance to drugs (AMR), a global threat to human and animal health, is often regarded as resulting from cooperative behaviour. Moreover, microbes generally evolve in volatile environments that, together with demographic fluctuations (birth and death events), drastically alter population size and strain survival. Motivated by the need to better understand the evolution of AMR, we study a population of time-varying size consisting of two competing strains, one drug-resistant and one drug-sensitive, subject to demographic and environmental variability. This is modelled by a binary carrying capacity randomly switching between mild and harsh environmental conditions, and driving the fluctuating volume (total amount of nutrients and antimicrobials at fixed concentration), and thus the size of the community (number of resistant and sensitive cells). We assume that AMR is a shared public good when the concentration of resistant cells exceeds a fixed concentration cooperation threshold, above which the sensitive strain has a growth advantage, whereas resistant cells dominate below it. Using computational means, and devising an analytical treatment (built on suitable quenched and annealed averaging procedures), we fully characterise the influence of fluctuations on the eco-evolutionary dynamics of AMR, and notably obtain specific strain fixation and long-lasting coexistence probabilities as a function of the environmental variation rate and cooperation threshold. We find that microbial strains tend to coexistence, but demographic fluctuations eventually lead to the extinction of resistant or sensitive cells for small or large values of the concentration cooperation threshold, respectively. This also holds for dynamic environments, whose specific properties determine the extinction timescale.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2024 The Author(s). This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | eco-evolutionary dynamics, fluctuations, coexistence, antimicrobial resistance, cooperation, environmental variability |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) > School of Mathematics (Leeds) > Applied Mathematics (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) EP/V014439/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 13 Jun 2024 14:45 |
Last Modified: | 22 Jan 2025 11:10 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | IOP Publishing |
Identification Number: | 10.1088/1751-8121/ad4ad6 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:213447 |
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