ArticleNature ecology & evolution2019
Microbial life cycles link global modularity in regulation to mosaic evolution.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- The limits of information in precise regulation of early multicellular life cycles.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Lives in a gram of soil: linking life cycle biology to soil ecology.The ISME journal · 2026Review
- TrackRefiner a tool for refinement of bacillus cell tracking data.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2025Article
- Article
- Pleiotropic hubs drive bacterial surface competition through parallel changes in colony composition and expansion.PLoS biology · 2023Article
- Cellular and Natural Viral Engineering in Cognition-Based Evolution.Communicative & integrative biology · 2023Review
- Article
- Article
- Adaptation and phenotypic diversification of Bacillus thuringiensis biofilm are accompanied by fuzzy spreader morphotypes.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2022Article
- Mutability of demographic noise in microbial range expansions.The ISME journal · 2021Article
- Cryptic surface-associated multicellularity emerges through cell adhesion and its regulation.PLoS biology · 2021Article
- Distribution and preservation of the components of the engulfment. What is beyond representative genomes?PloS one · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Microbes are exposed to changing environments, to which they can respond by adopting various lifestyles such as swimming, colony formation or dormancy. These lifestyles are often studied in isolation, thereby giving a fragmented view of the life cycle as a whole. Here, we study lifestyles in the context of this whole. We first use machine learning to reconstruct the expression changes underlying life cycle progression in the bacterium Bacillus subtilis, based on hundreds of previously acquired expression profiles. This yields a timeline that reveals the modular organization of the life cycle. By analysing over 380 Bacillales genomes, we then show that life cycle modularity gives rise to mosaic evolution in which life stages such as motility and sporulation are conserved and lost as discrete units. We postulate that this mosaic conservation pattern results from habitat changes that make these life stages obsolete or detrimental. Indeed, when evolving eight distinct Bacillales strains and species under laboratory conditions that favour colony growth, we observe rapid and parallel losses of the sporulation life stage across species, induced by mutations that affect the same global regulator. We conclude that a life cycle perspective is pivotal to understanding the causes and consequences of modularity in both regulation and evolution.
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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.