@article {69315,
	title = {Altruistic feeding and cell-cell signaling during bacterial differentiation actively enhance phenotypic heterogeneity},
	journal = {Sci Adv},
	volume = {10},
	year = {2024},
	month = {2024 Oct 18},
	pages = {eadq0791},
	abstract = {<p>Starvation triggers bacterial spore formation, a committed differentiation program that transforms a vegetative cell into a dormant spore. Cells in a population enter sporulation nonuniformly to secure against the possibility that favorable growth conditions, which put sporulation-committed cells at a disadvantage, may resume. This heterogeneous behavior is initiated by a passive mechanism: stochastic activation of a master transcriptional regulator. Here, we identify a cell-cell communication pathway containing the proteins ShfA (YabQ) and ShfP (YvnB) that actively promotes phenotypic heterogeneity, wherein <em>Bacillus subtilis</em> cells that start sporulating early use a calcineurin-like phosphoesterase to release glycerol, which simultaneously acts as a signaling molecule and a nutrient to delay nonsporulating cells from entering sporulation. This produced a more diverse population that was better poised to exploit a sudden influx of nutrients compared to those generating heterogeneity via stochastic gene expression alone. Although conflict systems are prevalent among microbes, genetically encoded cooperative behavior in unicellular organisms can evidently also boost inclusive fitness.</p>
},
	doi = {10.1126/sciadv.adq0791},
	url = {https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adq0791},
	author = {Taylor B. Updegrove and Thomas Delerue and V. Anantharaman and Hyomoon Cho and Carissa Chan and Thomas Nipper and Hyoyoung Choo-Wosoba and Lisa Jenkins and Lixia Zhang and Yijun Su and Hari Shroff and Jiji Chen and Carole Bewley and L. Aravind and Kumaran S Ramamurthi}
}
