Editor's Summary
9 July 2009
Microorganism behaviour: be prepared
Microorganisms, at first glance, look to be at the mercy of their environment and any changes that might take place within it. Reacting to events as they happen would seem to be their lot. So the finding that both bacteria and yeast, in environments where a sequence of changes follows a repeated pattern, can associate a stimulus with an appropriate response to a future environment comes as something of a surprise. In a process that resembles Pavlovian conditioning in some ways — but depends on regulatory networks and natural selection rather than cognition — Escherichia coli passing through the gut and yeast through the various stages of fermentation 'anticipate' their next experience and assemble the metabolic pathways to cope with it. E. coli later exposed repeatedly to only the first of the series of environments even 'forget' their training and lose the conditioned response.
News and Views: Evolutionary biology: Microbes exploit groundhog day
Can microorganisms learn from history? When a sequence of environmental changes is repeated, natural selection might select for responses that enable the microbes to prepare for later challenges in the sequence.
Tim F. Cooper
doi:10.1038/460181a
Article: Adaptive prediction of environmental changes by microorganisms
Amir Mitchell, Gal H. Romano, Bella Groisman, Avihu Yona, Erez Dekel, Martin Kupiec, Orna Dahan & Yitzhak Pilpel
doi:10.1038/nature08112
Abstract | Full Text | PDF (306K) | Supplementary information
