RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Molecular noise shapes bacteria-phage ecologies
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 399527
DO 10.1101/399527
A1 Jakob Ruess
A1 Maroš Pleška
A1 Călin C Guet
A1 Gašper Tkačik
YR 2018
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/08/25/399527.abstract
AB Mathematical models have been used successfully at diverse scales of biological organization, ranging from ecology and population dynamics to stochastic reaction events occurring between individual molecules in single cells. Generally, many biological processes unfold across multiple scales, with mutations being the best studied example of how stochasticity at the molecular scale can influence outcomes at the population scale. In many other contexts, however, an analogous link between micro-and macro-scale remains elusive, primarily due to the chal-lenges involved in setting up and analyzing multi-scale models. Here, we employ such a model to investigate how stochasticity propagates from individual biochemical reaction events in the bacterial innate immune system to the ecology of bacteria and bacterial viruses. We show an-alytically how the dynamics of bacterial populations are shaped by the activities of immunity-conferring enzymes in single cells and how the ecological consequences imply optimal bacterial defense strategies against viruses. Our results suggest that bacterial populations in the presence of viruses can either optimize their initial growth rate or their steady state population size, with the first strategy favoring simple and the second strategy favoring complex bacterial innate immunity.