Bacteria predict environmental changes

New research shows that even bacteria can evolve to predict things that are going to happen based on clues.

Saeed Tavazoie, a molecular biologist at Princeton University, who is also the lead researcher on E.coli bacteria, said, 'This is really the first evidence that unicellular bodies like bacteria also. able to combine information '.

The discovery uncovers a kind of predictive ability how bacteria understand the sensory cues from their environment. Understanding how this predictive ability affects bacterial behavior can help scientists control the bacteria better, benefit the industry and the treatment of infectious diseases.

When E. coli enters the body, their environment immediately warms up. Then when the bacteria enters the intestine, the oxygen is even less. Tavazoie and his colleagues found that warming alone makes the bacteria less effective. The bacteria anticipated the lack of oxygen and prepared for this according to the researchers reported in Science and May 8.

(Photo: www.epa.gov)

Bacteria obviously have no nervous or brain systems. But instead they learn through evolutionary changes in complex systems of interacting genes and proteins.

A single bacterium cannot learn this. The next generation has this ability over time evolution. Richard Losick, a bacterial geneticist at Harvard University, commented, 'Of course bacteria cannot predict the future but they can have trained speculations about the future based on natural selection and past events that shaped their gene regulation systems'.

Tavazoie's group also showed that through generations the bacteria could forget the link between increased temperature and reduced oxygen. When scientists develop bacteria in controlled conditions that separate the increase in temperature from the change in oxygen, the bacteria no longer know the reduction of oxygen after a few hundred generation.

Tavazoie said 'New ideas about bacterial behavior are not only important in industry where we want them to create something for us but also for infectious diseases where we want to control development. of them'.

Outside a person, many infectious bacteria become semi-latent, maintaining energy because environmental stimuli show that hard times are ahead. Understanding how bacterial genome systems handle signals in the environment can find ways to make bacteria slow to grow inside the human body.

Tavazoie said 'slowing down the growth of bacteria instead of killing them with antibiotics can prevent the spread of antibiotic-resistant diseases'.