Dybvig K
Department of Comparative Medicine, University of Alabama at Birmingham 35294.
Mol Microbiol. 1993 Nov;10(3):465-71. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2958.1993.tb00919.x.
Microorganisms have numerous strategies for coping with environmental changes. In many systems, a single cell has the capacity to generate a seemingly infinite array of phenotypic variants in just a few generations of growth. The resulting heterogeneous population is well equipped for sudden environmental change; even if only a few cells in the population possess a phenotype needed for survival, these cells have the capacity to regenerate a similarly diverse population. Phenotypic switching in these systems usually results from high-frequency DNA rearrangements which are the subject of this review.
微生物有多种应对环境变化的策略。在许多系统中，单个细胞在短短几代生长过程中就能产生看似无限的表型变异。由此产生的异质群体能够很好地应对突然的环境变化；即使群体中只有少数细胞具有生存所需的表型，这些细胞也有能力再生出同样多样的群体。这些系统中的表型转换通常源于高频DNA重排，这也是本综述的主题。
