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Updated: May 18, 2026

Investigation of Microbial Cooperation via Imaging Mass Spectrometry Analysis of Bacterial Colonies Grown on Agar and in Tissue During Infection
Published on: November 18, 2022
Cellular cooperation: insights from microbes
1MIT EECS Department, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. celiker@mit.edu
Abstract:
Cooperation between cells is a widespread phenomenon in nature, found across diverse systems ranging from microbial populations to multicellular organisms. For cooperation to evolve and be maintained within a population of cells, costs due to competition have to be outweighed by the benefits gained through cooperative actions. Because cooperation generally confers a cost to the cooperating cells, defector cells that do not cooperate but reap the benefits of cooperation can thrive and eventually drive the cooperating phenotypes to extinction. Here we summarize recent advances made in understanding how cooperation and multicellularity can evolve in microbial populations in the face of such conflicts and discuss parallels with cell populations within multicellular organisms.
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