Journal
MOLECULAR SYSTEMS BIOLOGY
Volume 12, Issue 12, Pages -Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.15252/msb.20167044
Keywords
cellular motility; chemotaxis; Jensen's inequality; non-genetic diversity; nonlinear systems
Categories
Funding
- National Institutes of Health [1R01GM106189]
- Allen Distinguished Investigator Program through The Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group [11562]
- James S. McDonnell Foundation grant on Complexity
- Division Of Physics
- Direct For Mathematical & Physical Scien [1522467] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Biological functions are typically performed by groups of cells that express predominantly the same genes, yet display a continuum of phenotypes. While it is known how one genotype can generate such non-genetic diversity, it remains unclear how different phenotypes contribute to the performance of biological function at the population level. We developed a microfluidic device to simultaneously measure the phenotype and chemotactic performance of tens of thousands of individual, freely swimming Escherichia coli as they climbed a gradient of attractant. We discovered that spatial structure spontaneously emerged from initially well-mixed wild-type populations due to non-genetic diversity. By manipulating the expression of key chemotaxis proteins, we established a causal relationship between protein expression, non-genetic diversity, and performance that was theoretically predicted. This approach generated a complete phenotype-to-performance map, in which we found a nonlinear regime. We used this map to demonstrate how changing the shape of a phenotypic distribution can have as large of an effect on collective performance as changing the mean phenotype, suggesting that selection could act on both during the process of adaptation.
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