Aug

5

From Cellular bet-hedging:

Today, we seek to gain some insight into how bacteria bet hedge. We will imagine that we are designing the stress response system for a custom, designer super-bacterium. Our goal is to maximize its survival and proliferation. To help it out, we provide it with an array of sensors, information processing circuits, and responses—exactly the sorts of circuits we have been studying.

A poor little bacterium doesn’t stand a chance of accurately predicting future temperature, salt, toxins, antibiotics, and attacking immune cells all by itself. Instead, it uses a form of biological bet hedging, in which the shared genome of a clonal cell population effectively spreads its bets, in the form of individual cells, across multiple physiological states, each adapted to a different possible future.

It is part of a larger course called Biological Circuit Design. I really don't like reading maths as I don't understand most of it. But fortunately, this course also has Python implementations for a lot of the concepts they outline.

Big Al adds:

You might also call this a good example of portfolio diversification.

The portfolio concept in ecology and evolution

Biological systems have similarities to efficient financial portfolios; the emergent properties of aggregate systems are often less volatile than their components. These portfolio effects derive from statistical averaging across the dynamics of system components, which often correlate weakly or negatively with each other through time and space. The “portfolio” concept when applied to ecological research provides important insights into how ecosystems are organized, how species interact, and how evolutionary strategies develop. It also helps identify appropriate scales for developing robust management and conservation schemes, and offers an approach that does not rely on prescriptive predictions about threats in an uncertain future. Rather, it presents a framework for managing risk from inevitable perturbations, many of which we will not be able to understand or anticipate.


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