8th Liquid Matter Conference September 6-10, 2011 Wien, Austria ...

P10.6Tue 611:23-14:00Modelling bacterial adaptation and evolutionTine Curk 1 and Jure Dobnikar 11 University of Cambridge, Department of Chemistry, Lensfield Road, CB2 1EW,Cambridge, United KingdomE. coli bacteria can live in a variety of different environments. When environment suddenlychanges a population needs to adapt to new living conditions as fast as possible. We model bacteriaon a scale from stupid to smart where stupid ones are not able to do chemotaxis and smart onesare. We argue that sustaining a working chemotaxis network costs energy. Stupid would prosperin very rich aqueous environment where chemotaxis is useless becouse they could grow and dividefaster. On the other hand smart would be better where food is scarce since finding it requires aworking chemotaxis. This simple model can be extended to include also other attributes. Crucialparameter in the model is correlation of smartness between mother and doughter cells. Comparingsimulation results of population adaptation rates to experiments we can determine fluctuations andcorrelation between mother and doughter cell protein expression rates (since chemotaxis efficiencydepends on expression of certian proteins).6