How does Saccharomyces deal with utilizing sugar
It is a common sense that all living organisms need sugar to generate energy in order to sustain themselves. As for saccharomyces, they usually use glucose for nutrients. If there are no glucose presenting, they could use other sugar as substituents like sucrose. However, they have to convert it into glucose in order to utilize. So the saccharomyces would secrete a specific enzyme to convert sucrose to glucose. This process is done externally. As a result, the glucose could be stolen by other saccharomyces nearby. For some of the saccharomyces, they could not generate this specific enzyme because of gene mutation. However, they could steal the glucose that is generated by the normal one.
In tuition, we could tell if you are an invader who could not convert sucrose to glucose, there is a huge advantage to you since you do not need energy to manufacture the enzyme: suppose we need 3 part of the energy to generate the enzyme and when it comes the glucose all those bacteria could get 5 part of energy. We could easily see the profit of bad saccharomyces is significantly larger than the profit of normal one. Therefore, the invader could outcompete the normal guys and they could breed more offspring. But wait, for those invaders, they could not utilize sucrose only by themselves. So what if the normal saccharomyces become extinct? Literally this is the end of this species.
Things shall be complicated in this situation. For the normal saccharomyces, they would not simply share all the glucose. Instead, they will store some amount of glucose. This will become an advantage if this could overpower the disadvantage of using energy to generate glucose.
Think of this situation that we are in the case that the normal saccharomyces is the minority. Since there are not enough glucose that could be generated, it is more important for each single saccharomyces to use the glucose efficiently. When there is a cache for the normal one, they could use glucose more efficient than those invaders. Therefore, they could outcompete the invaders and accumulate the number of their species. However, when the percentage of normal saccharomyces reaches a certain level, the disadvantage of burning energy for producing glucose shall not be trivial. Because of that, the number of invaders shall increase. All in all, there shall be a equilibrium for the ratio between normal ones and invaders.
Based on the content above, I could say behaving distinctively shall be the best strategy: play like a bad guy when other people are good guy; do good things when other people are stealing other people’s work. Following this manner could get a better profit.
This is the reference of this blog: http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_69b47ec60102vsxn.html