ISB News

Adaptive Prediction of Yeast

New Study on How Microbes Learn to Predict the Future

In a study published in Genome Biology and Evolution, researchers at Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) designed an experiment to evolve novel adaptive prediction capability in yeast by repetitively exposing it to caffeine, followed by a toxin. Remarkably, the yeast cells learned the structure of this novel environmental pattern within as few as 50 generations to use caffeine as a cue for anticipating and mitigating lethal effects of the toxin.