Projektnummer

0055538

Zusammenfassung

Evolution and maintenance of mutualism are difficult to explain by means of natural selection, as cheaters are likely to outcompete cooperative individuals. Accordingly, the shift from mutualism to parasitism is commonplace in nature, and can be induced by a third player that intervenes in the interaction between a symbiont and its host. Temperate phages are a typical example. They integrate into the genome of mutualistic bacteria and convert them into parasitic diseases - Cholera being one of them. Such tri-partite interactions quickly generate chaotic oscillations and their evolution...