ArticleScientific reports2017
The evolutionary advantage of heritable phenotypic heterogeneity.
Article in Scientific reports, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
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- A Systematic Review of Evidence for the Cost of Therapeutic Resistance in Cancer.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Stochastic phenotypic switching arises in response to directional selection in experimentally evolved multicellular yeast.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Evolutionary cell biology comes of age.Journal of cell science · 2025Article
- Reinforcement learning for adaptive control of phenotypically heterogeneous bacterial populations.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
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- The evolutionary cost of homophily: Social stratification facilitates stable variant coexistence and increased rates of evolution in host-associated pathogens.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Bacterial toxin-antitoxin systems: Novel insights on toxin activation across populations and experimental shortcomings.Current research in microbial sciences · 2023Review
- Collective behavior and nongenetic inheritance allow bacterial populations to adapt to changing environments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Genomic diversity and antimicrobial resistance of Campylobacter spp. from humans and livestock in Nigeria.Journal of biomedical science · 2022Article
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- Memory shapes microbial populations.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Phenotypic-dependent variability and the emergence of tolerance in bacterial populations.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- A Mathematical Study of the Influence of Hypoxia and Acidity on the Evolutionary Dynamics of Cancer.Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2021Article
- Predictive Analytics for Care and Management of Patients With Acute Diseases: Deep Learning-Based Method to Predict Crucial Complication Phenotypes.Journal of medical Internet research · 2021Article
- Nine Things Genomics Can Tell Us AboutFrontiers in genetics · 2020Review
- Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Phenotypic plasticity is an evolutionary driving force in diverse biological processes, including the adaptive immune system, the development of neoplasms, and the persistence of pathogens despite drug pressure. It is essential, therefore, to understand the evolutionary advantage of an allele that confers on cells the ability to express a range of phenotypes. Here, we study the fate of a new mutation that allows the expression of multiple phenotypic states, introduced into a finite population of individuals that can express only a single phenotype. We show that the advantage of such a mutation depends on the degree of phenotypic heritability between generations, called phenotypic memory. We analyze the fixation probability of the phenotypically plastic allele as a function of phenotypic memory, the variance of expressible phenotypes, the rate of environmental changes, and the population size. We find that the fate of a phenotypically plastic allele depends fundamentally on the environmental regime. In constant environments, plastic alleles are advantageous and their fixation probability increases with the degree of phenotypic memory. In periodically fluctuating environments, by contrast, there is an optimum phenotypic memory that maximizes the probability of the plastic allele's fixation. This same optimum memory also maximizes geometric mean fitness, in steady state. We interpret these results in the context of previous studies in an infinite-population framework. We also discuss the implications of our results for the design of therapies that can overcome persistence and, indirectly, drug resistance.
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