ScienceNews: Bacterial neighbors get mean

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ScienceNews: Bacterial neighbors get mean

Post by bystander » Tue Feb 23, 2010 6:47 pm

Bacterial neighbors get mean
Science News - 2010 Feb 23
On a pretty Indiana hillside, it's microscopic mutually assured destruction

Even without parking spaces, office refrigerators or other incitements to nastiness, bacteria in the wild can get downright spiteful.

Bacteria from an Indiana hillside produce toxins that can kill rival strains of the same species that live several meters away ... Such toxins, called bacteriocins, also hurt their producers by slowing growth or requiring that bacteria burst and die to distribute them.
...
From an evolutionary point of view, spite poses entertaining puzzles.
...
There’s no evidence the individual bacterium with a piddling growth curve or explosive death gets any immediate benefit from the bacteriocin. In terms of evolutionary biology, that’s outright, outdoor spite, according to a paper by Hawlena and her Indiana colleagues in the March American Naturalist.

“It’s suffering just to make others suffer,” Hawlena says, at least in terms of direct benefits.
Image
Iffy Neighborhood (From left: H. Hawlena; Arnon Tsairi)

On an Indiana hillside (left), strains of bacteria that live only meters apart produce different
toxins. Experiments show that some combinations of neighbors are deadly (top right, bacterial
growth in center of lab dish was stopped by toxin) and others are benign (bottom right).

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