Persister Cells – a Plausible Outcome of Neutral Coevolutionary Drift

The phenomenon of bacterial persistence – a non-inherited antibiotic tolerance in a minute fraction of the bacterial population, was observed more than 70 years ago. Nowadays, it is suggested that “persister cells” undergo an alternative scenario of the cell cycle; however, pathways involved in its emergence are still not identified. We present a mathematically grounded scenario of such possibility. We have determined that population drift in the space of multiple neutrally coupled mutations, which we called “neutrally coupled co-evolution” (NCCE), leads to increased dynamic complexity of bacterial populations via appearance of cells capable of carrying out a single cell cycle in two or more alternative ways and that universal properties of the coupled transcription-translation system underlie this phenotypic multiplicity. According to our hypothesis, modern persister cells have derived from such cells and regulatory mechanisms that govern the consolidation of this phenomenon represented the trigger. We assume that the described type of neutrally coupled co-evolution could play an important role in the origin of extremophiles, both in bacteria and archaea.