Genes for Breakfast

For now just copied the text of the main project page, written by (Yixian Song)

I've once read a paper of Redfield(1993) "Genes for Breakfast: The Have-Your-Cake and-Eat-lt-Too of Bacterial Transformation". Though it's an old publication, I still find the idea very inspiring. Well, considering bacteria living in a gene-pool with abandoned DNA strands, each bacterium can randomly "eat" free DNA strands, and use them as nutrition or for DNA repairing or even gene improvement. But the DNA strands were abandoned for a reason. Some of them can be virulent.(!!!) Besides bacteria can exchange DNA with each other, of course. We can define a population size of bacteria, amount of free DNA strands in gene-pool, percentage of virulent DNA and their virulence (impact on the bacteria fitness). We certainly can also consider the bacteria as a metapopulation.("A metapopulation consists of a group of spatially separated populations of the same species which interact at some level." - says wikipedia.org) The question to be answered will be "in which situation the bacterial population will become extinct in the end".

• Cool topic! I'd be happy to brain storm a bit on this (Felix Hol)
• So will I (Borys Wrobel)