Bacteria is all around us—not just in bathrooms or kitchen counters, but also inside our bodies, including in tumors, where microbiota often flourish.
Bacteria is all around us—not just in bathrooms or kitchen counters, but also inside our bodies, including in tumors, where microbiota often flourish. These “small ecologies” can hold the key to cancer drug therapies and learning more about them can help development new life-saving treatments.
What happens when different strains of bacteria are present in the same system? Do they co-exist? Do the strongest survive? In a microbial game of rock-paper-scissors, researchers at the University of California San Diego’s BioCircuits Institute uncovered a surprising answer. Their findings, titled “Survival of the weakest in non-transitive asymmetric interactions among strains of E. coli,” appeared in a recent edition of Nature Communications.
The research team consisted of Professor of Bioengineering and Molecular Biology Jeff Hasty; Michael Liao and Arianna Miano, both bioengineering graduate students; and Chloe Nguyen, a bioengineering undergraduate. They engineered three strains of E. coli (Escherichia coli) so that each strain produced a toxin that could kill one other strain, just like a game of rock-paper-scissors.
Read more at: University of California - San Diego
Diagram of engineered strains including one toxin and two immunity genes. Each toxin targets a different essential biological component of E. coli cells. (Photo Credit: BioCircuits Institute/UC San Diego)
