Epigenetic Ratchet: Spontaneous Adaptation via Stochastic Gene Expression

Adaptation to unforeseen environmental changes is one of the most prominent features that characterize the living system. Although signal transduction and gene regulation networks evolved to adapt specific environmental conditions that they frequently experience, it is also reported that bacteria can modify their gene expression patterns to survive a huge variety of environmental conditions even without such pre-designed networks to adapt specically to each environment. Here we propose a general mechanism of cells for such “spontaneous” adaptation, on the basis of stochastic gene expression and epigenetic modication. First, a variety of gene expression states that are marginally stable states are generated by epigenetic modication. Then by taking advantage of stochastic gene expression and dilution by cellular growth, it is shown that, a gene expression pattern that achieves greater cell growth is generically selected, as conrmed by simulations and analysis of several models. The mechanism does not require any design of gene regulation networks. General relevance of the mechanism to cell biology is also discussed.