Santa Fe Institute Researcher Figures Out Factors That Make Bacteria More Modular

Main Category: Infectious Diseases / Bacteria / Viruses
Article Date: 30 May 2008 - 6:00 PDT

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Many bacteria break their metabolic processes into chunks. That may be logically tidy, but it's often metabolically inefficient. Researchers have now figured out the factors that tend to make bacteria more modular.

Elhanan Borenstein of the Santa Fe Institute and Stanford University, together with Anat Kreimer, Uri Gophna, and Eytan Ruppin of Tel Aviv University, constructed the metabolic networks of many species of bacteria and measured how much those networks broke into pieces, or modules. Then they looked for factors that correlate.

They found that large networks involving many different enzymes tended to be more modular. Also, bacteria that tend to live in many different environments tend to be more modular. This makes sense, Borenstein says. "If your environment is always the same, then you just do whatever you need to do in the most optimal way. If the environment is constantly changing, you might develop one set of processes to cope with one set of environments and another to cope with another."

Many bacteria transfer genes among themselves, instead of simply handing them from ancestor to descendent. Bacteria that do more of this also tend to be more modular. "If you are going to give away and get parts of different networks, it makes sense for your network to be modular," Borenstein says. That way, the transfers are more likely to be useful. In this case, the greater rate of transfer could easily be both cause and effect of modularity, Borenstein points out.

Finally, the researchers found that modularity tends to decrease over generations. "This is probably because bacteria get more specialized as they evolve," Borenstein says.

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Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release.
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Their work appeared May 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is an acknowledged leader in multidisciplinary scientific research. Its objectives are to discover and understand the common fundamental principles in physical, computational, biological, and social complex systems that underlie many of the most profound issues facing science and society today. By transcending disciplines, breaking academic molds, and drawing together an international network of unorthodox creative thinkers, SFI is an independent non-profit research and education center supported by grants, charitable giving, and corporate relationships.

Source: Elhanan Borenstein
Santa Fe Institute