Search results for "cystovirus"
showing 2 items of 2 documents
Prisoner's dilemma in an RNA virus
1999
The evolution of competitive interactions among viruses1 was studied in the RNA phage φ6 at high and low multiplicities of infection (that is, at high and low ratios of infecting phage to host cells). At high multiplicities, many phage infect and reproduce in the same host cell, whereas at low multiplicities the viruses reproduce mainly as clones. An unexpected result of this study1 was that phage grown at high rates of co-infection increased in fitness initially, but then evolved lowered fitness. Here we show that the fitness of the high-multiplicity phage relative to their ancestors generates a pay-off matrix conforming to the prisoner's dilemma strategy of game theory2,3. In this strateg…