Alternating lysis and lysogeny is a winning strategy in bacteriophages due to Parrondo’s Paradox

Cheong, Kang Hao; Wen, Tao; Benler, Sean; Ev, Koonin

doi:10.1101/2021.03.07.434273

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…Contrary to prior work finding optimal phage strategies survive while sub-optimal strategies go extinct [11, 17] our results suggest coexistence of different strategies may be commonplace. With a single obligate lytic phage strain and a single temperate phage strain of different immunity classes (i.e.…”

contrasting

confidence: 99%

Lytic and temperate phage naturally coexist in a dynamic population model

Kimchi

Meir

Wingreen

2022

Preprint

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Obligate lytic and temperate phage preying on the same bacteria coexist despite the presumption that a single resource should only support a single competitor. We construct a mathematical model demonstrating that such coexistence is a natural outcome of chaotic dynamics arising from competition among multiple phage and their lysogens. While obligate lytic (virulent) phage populations typically dominate, surprisingly, they also more readily fluctuate to extinction within a local community.

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contrasting

confidence: 99%

Lytic and temperate phage naturally coexist in a dynamic population model

Kimchi

Meir

Wingreen

2022

Preprint

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“…the phage can pay a high price in terms of, e.g. its lysogenic growth rate compared to the nonintelligence-gathering phage, and still have an advantage ( 13 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The value of information gathering in phage–bacteria warfare

Dahan,

Wingreen,

Meir

2023

PNAS Nexus

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Phages—viruses that infect bacteria—have evolved over billions of years to overcome bacterial defenses. Temperate phage, upon infection, can “choose” between two pathways: lysis—in which the phage create multiple new phage particles, which are then liberated by cell lysis, and lysogeny—where the phage’s genetic material is added to the bacterial DNA and transmitted to the bacterial progeny. It was recently discovered that some phages can read information from the environment related to the density of bacteria or the number of nearby infection attempts. Such information may help phage make the right choice between the two pathways. Here, we develop a theoretical model that allows an infecting phage to change its strategy (i.e. the ratio of lysis to lysogeny) depending on an outside signal, and we find the optimal strategy that maximizes phage proliferation. While phages that exploit extra information naturally win in competition against phages with a fixed strategy, there may be costs to information, e.g. as the necessary extra genes may affect the growth rate of a lysogen or the burst size of new phage for the lysis pathway. Surprisingly, even when phages pay a large price for information, they can still maintain an advantage over phages that lack this information, indicating the high benefit of intelligence gathering in phage–bacteria warfare.

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