ArticlePloS one2008
Memory in microbes: quantifying history-dependent behavior in a bacterium.
Article in PloS one, 2008. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 57 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
57 citing papers in PubMed.
- Decoding the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of bacterial virulence gene expression using single-cell approaches.Frontiers in microbiology · 2026Review
- Structural determinants of soft memory in recurrent biological networks.Biophysical reviews · 2025Review
- Uncertainty minimization and pattern recognition inJournal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Environment-mediated interactions cause an externalized and collective memory in bacteria.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Phenotypic memory in quorum sensing.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Microfluidic approaches in microbial ecology.Lab on a chip · 2024Review
- Revisiting plant stress memory: mechanisms and contribution to stress adaptation.Physiology and molecular biology of plants : an international journal of functional plant biology · 2024Review
- A heritable iron memory enables decision-making inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Fitness cost associated with cell phenotypic switching drives population diversification dynamics and controllability.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Phenotypic heterogeneity in the bacterial oxidative stress response is driven by cell-cell interactions.Cell reports · 2023Article
- Computational Methods for the Design of Recombinase Logic Circuits with Adaptable Circuit Specifications.Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2023Article
- A reinforcement learning-based hybrid modeling framework for bioprocess kinetics identification.Biotechnology and bioengineering · 2023Article
- Ecological memory of prior nutrient exposure in the human gut microbiome.The ISME journal · 2022Article
- Novel prokaryotic system employing previously unknown nucleic acids-based receptors.Microbial cell factories · 2022Article
- Probabilistic Inference with Polymerizing Biochemical Circuits.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Transcriptional Profiling of Pseudomonas aeruginosa Infections.Advances in experimental medicine and biology · 2022Review
- Cellular Memory of HipA-Induced Growth Arrest: The Length of Cell Growth Arrest Becomes Shorter for Each Successive Induction.Microorganisms · 2021Article
- Towards the Idea of Molecular Brains.International journal of molecular sciences · 2021Review
- Memory shapes microbial populations.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Nano-fats for bugs: the benefits of lipid nanoparticles for antimicrobial therapy.Drug delivery and translational research · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Memory is usually associated with higher organisms rather than bacteria. However, evidence is mounting that many regulatory networks within bacteria are capable of complex dynamics and multi-stable behaviors that have been linked to memory in other systems. Moreover, it is recognized that bacteria that have experienced different environmental histories may respond differently to current conditions. These "memory" effects may be more than incidental to the regulatory mechanisms controlling acclimation or to the status of the metabolic stores. Rather, they may be regulated by the cell and confer fitness to the organism in the evolutionary game it participates in. Here, we propose that history-dependent behavior is a potentially important manifestation of memory, worth classifying and quantifying. To this end, we develop an information-theory based conceptual framework for measuring both the persistence of memory in microbes and the amount of information about the past encoded in history-dependent dynamics. This method produces a phenomenological measure of cellular memory without regard to the specific cellular mechanisms encoding it. We then apply this framework to a strain of Bacillus subtilis engineered to report on commitment to sporulation and degradative enzyme (AprE) synthesis and estimate the capacity of these systems and growth dynamics to 'remember' 10 distinct cell histories prior to application of a common stressor. The analysis suggests that B. subtilis remembers, both in short and long term, aspects of its cell history, and that this memory is distributed differently among the observables. While this study does not examine the mechanistic bases for memory, it presents a framework for quantifying memory in cellular behaviors and is thus a starting point for studying new questions about cellular regulation and evolutionary strategy.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.