ArticleBiophysical journal2021
Persistence as an Optimal Hedging Strategy.
Article in Biophysical journal, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 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
10 citing papers in PubMed, 17 citations in OpenAlex.
- Bacterial Persister Cells as Evolutionary Catalysts of Antibiotic Resistance: Mechanisms, Clinical Implications, and Therapeutic Strategies.Antibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Review
- Non-ergodicity in ecology and evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Threshold-awareness in adaptive cancer therapy.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Understanding cellular growth strategies via optimal control.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Article
- Identifying cell-to-cell variability in internalization using flow cytometry.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- Dynamic Boolean modelling reveals the influence of energy supply on bacterial efflux pump expression.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- Implementation and acceleration of optimal control for systems biology.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2021Review
- Group Behavior and Emergence of Cancer Drug Resistance.Trends in cancer · 2021Review
- Identifiability analysis for stochastic differential equation models in systems biology.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Bacteria invest in a slow-growing subpopulation, called persisters, to ensure survival in the face of uncertainty. This hedging strategy is remarkably similar to financial hedging, where diversifying an investment portfolio protects against economic uncertainty. We provide a new, to our knowledge, theoretical foundation for understanding cellular hedging by unifying the study of biological population dynamics and the mathematics of financial risk management through optimal control theory. Motivated by the widely accepted role of volatility in the emergence of persistence, we consider several models of environmental volatility described by continuous-time stochastic processes. This allows us to study an emergent cellular hedging strategy that maximizes the expected per capita growth rate of the population. Analytical and simulation results probe the optimal persister strategy, revealing results that are consistent with experimental observations and suggest new opportunities for experimental investigation and design. Overall, we provide a new, to our knowledge, way of conceptualizing and modeling cellular decision making in volatile environments by explicitly unifying theory from mathematical biology and finance.
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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.