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Letter

Nature Genetics 40, 471–475 (1 April 2008) | doi:10.1038/ng.110

Stochastic switching as a survival strategy in fluctuating environments

Murat Acar , Jerome T Mettetal & Alexander van Oudenaarden

A classic problem in population and evolutionary biology is to understand how a population optimizes its fitness in fluctuating environments. A population might enhance its fitness by allowing individual cells to stochastically transition among multiple phenotypes, thus ensuring that some cells are always prepared for an unforeseen environmental fluctuation.