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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

GRAVE DISAPPEARANCE. "Genetically regulated programmed cell death is a phenotype that is characterized by the rapid disappearance of the cell that is expressing it. In other words, genes that encode effectors of programmed cell death can be viewed as allowing a phenotype that is the grave of the genome that expresses them." 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

PHENOTYPIC SELECTION. "Natural selection does not act directly on genes, but on the phenotypes they allow the cell that encodes them to achieve. Genetic mutation leads to genetic diversification, and hence to phenotypic diversity. Natural selection sanctioned by death is a process of competition between phenotypes whereby genomes allowing for poorly adapted phenotypes do not get transmitted into the next generation, while genomes that allow fitter phenotypes become selected. 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

UNICELLULAR AVOIDANCE. "Genetic programs allowing regulated cell suicide would have been obligatorily counterselected in single-celled organisms." 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

DEATH HALLMARK. "The evolution of cell death programs as prerequisites of multicellularity. One of the hallmarks of multicellularity is that the individual cellular fate is sacrificed for the benefit of a higher order of life—the organism." http://mcb.berkeley.edu/courses/mcbc245/MCBC245PDFs/Jan31/Huettenbrenner2003.pdf View in LinkedIn

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-ANTIDOTE STORY. "The reason why bacteria can release a toxin that kill other bacteria without getting killed themselves is that they synthesize an antidote that is not secreted and protects them against the lethal effect of the toxin." http://www.nature.com/cdd/journal/v9/n4/full/4400950a.html View in LinkedIn