Affiliation:
1. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
2. Department of Veterinary Science and Microbiology, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721
Abstract
ABSTRACT
It has recently been proposed that phenotypic variation in clonal populations of bacterial species results from intracellular “noise,” i.e., random fluctuations in levels of cellular molecules, which would be predicted to be insensitive to selective pressure. To test this notion, we propagated five populations of
Bacillus subtilis
for 5,000 generations with selection for one phenotype: the decision to sporulate. In support of the noise hypothesis, we report that none of the populations responded to selection by improving their efficiency of sporulation, indicating that intracellular noise is independent of heritable genotype.
Publisher
American Society for Microbiology
Subject
Molecular Biology,Microbiology
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