Collective behavior and nongenetic inheritance allow bacterial populations to adapt to changing environments.

ABSTRACT: Collective behaviors require coordination among a group of individuals. As a result, individuals that are too phenotypically different from the rest of the group can be left out, reducing heterogeneity, but increasing coordination. If individuals also reproduce, the offspring can have different phenotypes from their parent(s). This raises the question of how these two opposing processes-loss of diversity by collective behaviors and generation of it through growth and inheritance-dynamically shape the phenotypic composition of an isogenic population. We examine this question theoretically using collective migration of chemotactic bacteria as a model system, where cells of different swimming phenotypes are better suited to navigate in different environments. We find that the differential los

SUBMITTER: Mattingly HH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9245662 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature