Journal
ANNUAL REVIEW OF GENETICS
Volume 42, Issue -, Pages 253-268Publisher
ANNUAL REVIEWS
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.genet.42.110807.091601
Keywords
individuality; persistence; competence; phase variation; antigenic variation; bistability; noise; bet hedging
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Funding
- The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [HR0011-05-1-0057]
- Alberta Heritage Foundation
- Canada Research Chair in Microbial Gene Expression
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While traditionally microbiologists have examined bacterial behavior averaged over large populations, increasingly we are becoming aware that bacterial populations can I,e composed of phenotypically diverse individuals generated by a variety of mechanisms. Though the results of different mechanisms, the phenomena of bistability, persistence, variation in chemotactic response, and phase and antigenic variation are all strategies to develop population-level diversity. The understanding of individuality in bacteria requires an appreciation of their environmental and ecological context, and thus evolutionary theory regarding adaptations to time-variable environments is becoming more applicable to these problems. In particular, the application of game and information theory to bacterial individuality has addressed some interesting problems of bacterial behavior. In this review we discuss the mechanisms of generating population-level variability, and the application of evolutionary theory to problems of individuality in bacteria.
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