Year: 2022

JUDGE, JURY, AND HANGMAN. "The selection for killer genes encoding toxins used in offensive evolutionary arms race against other bacterial species, and the concomitant selection for genes encoding antidotes allowing self-protection is a process that provides the bacteria with both executioners and repressors that can prevent the effect of these executioners." http://www.nature.com/cdd/journal/v9/n4/full/4400950a.html View in LinkedIn

TOXIN KILLER GENES. "These genetic modules bear surprising resemblance to the basic core of the genetic modules that allow, in cells from multicellular organisms, the regulation of programmed cell death." http://www.nature.com/cdd/journal/v9/n4/full/4400950a.html View in LinkedIn

LINEAR EXTENSION. "The ability to self-destruct may have simply evolved as a consequence of a capacity to kill others." http://www.nature.com/cdd/journal/v9/n4/full/4400950a.html View in LinkedIn

PHAGE ARMS RACE. "In the prokaryote world, competition for environmental resources is not restricted to competition between different bacterial species. Infectious agents, such as plasmids and bacteriophage viruses, also compete with bacteria: in this case, it is the bacteria itself that is the resource, and the evolutionary arms race involves the spreading of the heterogeneous mobile genetic elements in the bacterial colony." http://www.nature.com/cdd/journal/v9/n4/full/4400950a.html View in LinkedIn

PREY THAT HUNTS FOR YOU. "Strategies allowing plasmids and bacteriophages to propagate in the bacterial colony involves various mechanisms that allow spreading from one bacteria to another. One of these strategies depends on the presence, in the infectious agents of genetic modules encoding a toxin and an antidote. In fact, most toxin/antidote modules that allow bacteria from a given species to kill other bacterial species are not encoded by the bacterial chromosome, but by plasmids that infect the bacteria.” http://www.nature.com/cdd/journal/v9/n4/full/4400950a.html View in LinkedIn

UNDER THE RADAR. "Natural selection can favor the propagation of given genes for the sole reason that they are successful at propagating themselves, while being of no advantage, or sometimes while even being detrimental, to the fitness of the organisms that carry them. Such genes have been called 'selfish genes." http://www.nature.com/cdd/journal/v9/n4/full/4400950a.html View in LinkedIn

UNHOLY ALLIANCE. "It is interesting to think that the genetic modules that are now involved in the regulation of what we call 'altruistic' regulated programmed cell death may have initially emerged and become selected as 'selfish genetic modules', for the sole reason that encoding an executioner and an inhibitor of the executioner just made them good at propagating themselves." http://www.nature.com/cdd/journal/v9/n4/full/4400950a.html View in LinkedIn

0 https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/10/fruit-carving-by-takehiro-kishimoto/ View in LinkedIn

KEY CAVEAT. "A cell suicide program will become counterselected unless it is regulated in such a way that the sacrifice of some individuals in a unicellular colony will benefit (or at least will not prevent) the survival of other members of the colony." http://www.nature.com/cdd/journal/v9/n4/full/4400950a.html View in LinkedIn

START OF THE STORY. "In favorable environmental conditions, Bacillus subtilis undergoes vegetative growth through symmetrical cell division. In adverse environmental conditions, such as nutrient shortage, Bacillus subtilis undergoes a complex developmental program whose initiation depends, as mentioned above, on cell density and on the concentration of released quorum factors. When initiated, this program begins with a process of asymmetric cell division." http://www.nature.com/cdd/journal/v9/n4/full/4400950a.html View in LinkedIn