The web of life is weaved from diverse symbiotic interactions between species. Symbioses vary from antagonistic interactions such as competition and predation to beneficial interactions such as mutualism. What are the bases for the origin and persistence of symbiosis? What affects the ecology and evolution of symbioses? How do symbiotic interactions generate ecological patterns? How do symbiotic partners evolve and coevolve? Many of these questions are difficult to address in natural systems. Artificial systems, from abstract to living, have been constructed to capture essential features of natural symbioses and to address these key questions. With reduced complexity and increased controllability, artificial systems can serve as useful models for natural systems. We review how artificial systems have contributed to our understanding of symbioses.

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Mutualisms can be promoted by pleiotropic win-win mutations which directly benefit self (self-serving) and partner (partner-serving). Intuitively, partner-serving phenotype could be quantified as an individual’s benefit supply rate to partners. Here, we demonstrate the inadequacy of this thinking, and propose an alternative. Specifically, we evolved well-mixed mutualistic communities where two engineered yeast strains exchanged essential metabolites lysine and hypoxanthine. Among cells that consumed lysine and released hypoxanthine, a chromosome duplication mutation seemed win-win: it improved cell’s affinity for lysine (self-serving), and increased hypoxanthine release rate per cell (partner-serving). However, increased release rate was due to increased cell size accompanied by increased lysine utilization per birth. Consequently, total hypoxanthine release rate per lysine utilization (defined as ‘exchange ratio’) remained unchanged. Indeed, this mutation did not increase the steady state growth rate of partner, and is thus solely self-serving during long-term growth. By extension, reduced benefit production rate by an individual may not imply cheating.

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Cooperation, paying a cost to benefit others, is widespread. Cooperation can be promoted by pleiotropic 'win-win' mutations which directly benefit self ('self-serving') and partner ('partner-serving'). Previously, we showed that partner-serving should be defined as increased benefit supply rate per intake benefit (Hart & Pineda et al., 2019). Here, we report that win-win mutations can rapidly evolve even under conditions unfavorable for cooperation. Specifically, in a well-mixed environment we evolved engineered yeast cooperative communities where two strains exchanged costly metabolites lysine and hypoxanthine. Among cells that consumed lysine and released hypoxanthine, ecm21 mutations repeatedly arose. ecm21 is self-serving, improving self's growth rate in limiting lysine. ecm21 is also partner-serving, increasing hypoxanthine release rate per lysine consumption and the steady state growth rate of partner. ecm21 also arose in monocultures evolving in lysine-limited chemostats. Thus, even without any history of cooperation or pressure to maintain cooperation, pleiotropic win-win mutations may readily evolve.

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Currently, many ischemic stroke patients worldwide suffer from physical and mental impairments, and thus have a low quality of life. However, although rehabilitation is acknowledged as an effective way to recover patients’ health, there does not exist yet an adaptive training platform for animal tests so far. For this sake, this paper aims to develop an adaptive escalator (AE) for rehabilitation of rats with cerebral ischemia. Rats were observed to climb upward spontaneously, and a motor-driven escalator, equipped with a position detection feature and an acceleration/deceleration mechanism, was constructed accordingly as an adaptive training platform. The rehabilitation performance was subsequently rated using an incline test, a rotarod test, the infarction volume, the lesion volume, the number of MAP2 positive cells and the level of cortisol. This paper is presented in 3 parts as follows. Part 1 refers to the escalator mechanism design, part 2 describes the adaptive ladder-climbing rehabilitation mechanism, and part 3 discusses the validation of an ischemic stroke model. As it turned out, a rehabilitated group using this training platform, designated as the AE group, significantly outperformed a control counterpart in terms of a rotarod test. After the sacrifice of the rats, the AE group gave an average infarction volume of (34.36 ± 3.8)%, while the control group gave (66.41 ± 3.1)%, validating the outperformance of the escalator-based rehabilitation platform in a sense. An obvious difference between the presented training platform and conventional counterparts is the platform mechanism, and for the first time in the literature rats can be well and voluntarily rehabilitated at full capacity using an adaptive escalator. Taking into account the physical diversity among rats, the training strength provided was made adaptive as a reliable way to eliminate workout or secondary injury. Accordingly, more convincing arguments can be made using this mental stress-free training platform.