Social Skills -the Key To Bacterial Evolution

Bacteria have lived for millions of years in our planet where with an impressive capability to adapt, they now colonise virtually every environment, including us. But as tiny one-cell organisms they had to learn to work together to be powerful enough to act on the environment and other organisms. And now, new research has discovered that their evolution is triggered exactly by these interactions, as scientists from Centre for Environmental Biology at the University of Lisbon in Portugal and the Institute Pasteur in Paris show that bacteria’s genes for secreted proteins (the ones that mediate the interactions with the outside) evolve faster than any others in the genome.  read more

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