Аннотация
<title>Author Summary</title><p>Cooperation is a much
studied and debated phenomena in the microbial world
marked by a key question: Given the survival of the
fittest evolutionary paradigm, why do individuals act
in seemingly altruistic ways, paying a cost to help
others? Kin selection and group selection, together
with mathematical tools from areas such as economics
and game theory, have provided some answers. However,
they largely ignored the underlying genetic and genomic
mechanisms that drive the evolution of cooperation. In
this study, we show that the architecture of the
genomes has a major role in shaping the fate of
cooperating populations. Specifically, we use an
<italic>in silico</italic> evolution platform and
discover that genes for cooperative traits are
“hiding” behind metabolic ones by overlapping their
sequences or sharing operons. In conditions where
cheaters may outcompete the cooperators, this entangled
architecture evolves spontaneously and effectively
protects cooperation from invasion by cheater mutants.
We describe a novel genetic mechanism for the evolution
and maintenance of cooperation and, by taking into
account the second order selection pressures on the
genomes, highlight the need for going beyond simple
game theory models in its study.</p>
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