期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2018
卷号：115
期号：32
页码：E7462-E7468
DOI：10.1073/pnas.1802887115
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：Features of the CRISPR-Cas system, in which bacteria integrate small segments of phage genome (spacers) into their DNA to neutralize future attacks, suggest that its effect is not limited to individual bacteria but may control the fate and structure of whole populations. Emphasizing the population-level impact of the CRISPR-Cas system, recent experiments show that some bacteria regulate CRISPR-associated genes via the quorum sensing (QS) pathway. Here we present a model that shows that from the highly stochastic dynamics of individual spacers under QS control emerges a rank-abundance distribution of spacers that is time invariant, a surprising prediction that we test with dynamic spacer-tracking data from literature. This distribution depends on the state of the competing phage–bacteria population, which due to QS-based regulation may coexist in multiple stable states that vary significantly in their phage-to-bacterium ratio, a widely used ecological measure to characterize microbial systems.
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