Newby Gregory A, Kayatekin Can
a Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology , Cambridge , MA , USA.
b Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research , Cambridge , MA , USA.
Prion. 2018 Jul 24;12(3-4):1-5. doi: 10.1080/19336896.2018.1469945.
Microbial prions facilitate a variety of phenotypic switches. Recently-developed tools that can directly interrogate, in the living cell, the aggregation state of a protein have enabled a wider range of experiments for prion-mediated behaviors. With such tools, the roles of the yeast prion [SWI] in migration and mating were studied. Although [SWI] cells were consistently less fit than their [swi] counterparts under traditional laboratory conditions, in these new phenotypic paradigms [SWI] cells demonstrated a distinct advantage. [SWI] cells dispersed over a larger area under conditions resembling rainfall and outcrossed more frequently. We postulate that many behaviors in microorganisms may be modulated by stochastic prion switching. In diverse and changing natural environments, prion switching at low frequency may promote greater fitness of the population by specializing a small number of individuals with altered responses to their environments.
微生物朊病毒促进了多种表型转换。最近开发的能够在活细胞中直接探究蛋白质聚集状态的工具，使得针对朊病毒介导行为的实验范围更广。利用这些工具，研究了酵母朊病毒[SWI]在迁移和交配中的作用。尽管在传统实验室条件下，[SWI]细胞的适应性始终低于其[swi]对应细胞，但在这些新的表型范式中，[SWI]细胞表现出明显优势。在类似降雨的条件下，[SWI]细胞扩散到更大的区域，并且异交更频繁。我们推测，微生物中的许多行为可能受到随机朊病毒转换的调节。在多样且不断变化的自然环境中，低频的朊病毒转换可能通过使少数个体对环境的反应发生改变而提高种群的适应性。
