Wall Street financiers have more in common with bacteria than you might expect (ahem), PhysOrg reports, based on a new study that shows how microbes manage their investments:
“We have found that a particular genetic circuit is responsible for generating diversity within the bacteria population,” said senior author Dr. Gürol Süel, assistant professor of pharmacology and in the Cecil H. and Ida Green Comprehensive Center for Molecular, Computational and Systems Biology at UT Southwestern.
This diversity, like a diversified investment portfolio, means that each bacterium has characteristics that allow it to survive under certain conditions, said Dr. Süel. “When conditions are highly variable, some individual bacteria are equipped to thrive in the highs or lows, while others tank,” he said. “It’s like the stock market. If you invest all your money in just one stock, and conditions change to lessen or completely eliminate its value, you won’t survive financially. Similarly, in the case of these bacteria, if all the cells were adapted to only a small, rigid set of environmental factors, the population would be wiped out if conditions unexpectedly changed.
“There seems to be an optimization going on in these organisms,” he added.
And if the idea of a germ market seems strangely unsettling to you, wait until you read how they were able to study their subjects… by inserting genetic circuits into their bodies:
Dr. Süel believes his group is the first to insert such a synthetic genetic circuit into living bacterium and show that it can replace the biological function of the native version. He said his team was surprised to find that the behavior of the synthetic circuit was most precise, essentially generating less noise. The result was a population less diverse than the natural one. They were even more surprised to find that the lack of precision – or greater noisiness – in the native circuit ultimately allows bacteria to survive in a wider range of environments.
“It turns out that sometimes being sloppy can be good,” Dr. Süel said.
Good old chaos, helping us survive.