A Game Theoretical Approach to Microbial Coexistence

Huge numbers of microbes coexist in almost all habitats of our planet. Their interactions are governed by complex mechanisms, where both competition for resources and toxin production play important roles. Our goal is to understand key mechanisms that lead to coexistence. In this chapter we study many possible scenarios of microbial interactions and we analyze whether or not they can lead to coexistence of species. To achieve this we implemented agent-based models that mimic local dynamics of microbes; initially well mixed microbes from different species interact in a grid with a regular structure. Among others, we show that the coexistence rate is negatively correlated with the number of neighbors of each cell in the grid. Another observation is that the order of selection of focal cells in the grid influences the coexistence rate.

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