It has long been observed that many bacterial and viral species exhibit stress response diversification: that is, in a population of cells under identical environmental conditions, some cells will embark on the 'selected'
stress response, while the remainder activate alternative pathways. Such
observations of population diversification open up a number of fundamental questions about the origin and purpose of phenotypic noise. The most basic of these questions is whether this noise is controlled or incidental:
evolutionarily advantageous, deleterious, or neutral? If stress response
diversification is indeed controlled and selected for rather than incidental, this sets the stage for three lines of inquiry, essentially the 'what', 'how', and 'why' of diversification. In this talk I'll touch on these topics as applied to B. subtilis, a bacterium exhibiting a rich spectrum of stress responses, and in the process illustrate how tools from molecular microbiology, mathematical modeling, comparative genomics, and evolutionary game theory can be combined to explore cellular design and evolution.
Audio (MP3 File, Podcast Ready)
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