life inspired

Most organisms reproduce through outcrossing, even though it comes with substantial costs. The Red Queen hypothesis proposes that selection from coevolving pathogens facilitates the persistence of outcrossing despite these costs. We used experimental coevolution to test the Red Queen hypothesis and found that coevolution with a bacterial pathogen (Serratia marcescens) resulted in significantly more outcrossing in mixed mating experimental populations of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Furthermore, we found that coevolution with the pathogen rapidly drove obligately selfing populations to extinction, whereas outcrossing populations persisted through reciprocal coevolution. Thus, consistent with the Red Queen hypothesis, coevolving pathogens can select for biparental sex.
Running with the Red Queen: Host-Parasite Coevolution Selects for Biparental Sex

Computational and biological systems are often distributed so that processors (cells) jointly solve a task, without any of them receiving all inputs or observing all outputs. Maximal independent set (MIS) selection is a fundamental distributed computing procedure that seeks to elect a set of local leaders in a network. A variant of this problem is solved during the development of the fly’s nervous system, when sensory organ precursor (SOP) cells are chosen. By studying SOP selection, we derived a fast algorithm for MIS selection that combines two attractive features. First, processors do not need to know their degree; second, it has an optimal message complexity while only using one-bit messages. Our findings suggest that simple and efficient algorithms can be developed on the basis of biologically derived insights. Full paper @ Science