Scientists have engineered bacteria that are capable of
sacrificing themselves for the good of the bacterial population. These altruistically
inclined bacteria, which are described online in the journal Molecular Systems
Biology, can be used to demonstrate the conditions where programmed cell death
becomes a distinct advantage for the survival of the bacterial population.
“We have used a synthetic biology approach to explicitly
measure and test the adaptive advantage of programmed bacterial cell death in
Escherichia coli,” said Lingchong You, senior author of the study and an
associate professor at the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Duke
University, and the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy. “The
system is tunable which means that the extent of altruistic death in the
bacterial population can be increased. We are therefore able to control the
extent of programmed cell death as well as test the benefits of altruistic
death under different conditions.” The lead author of the study is Yu Tanouchi,
a graduate student in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Anand Pai and
Nicolas Buchler also contributed to the work.
journal reference (open access): nature molecular systems biology >>