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SUNDAY SCIENCE: BACTERIA EVOLVED TO HELP NEIGHBORING CELLS AFTER
DEATH, NEW RESEARCH REVEALS  
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Durham University
February 13, 2025
Phys.org
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_ Darwin's theory of natural selection provides an explanation for
why organisms develop traits that help them survive and reproduce.
Because of this, death is often seen as a failure rather than a
process shaped by evolution. _

, Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

 

Darwin's theory of natural selection provides an explanation for why
organisms develop traits that help them survive and reproduce. Because
of this, death is often seen as a failure rather than a process shaped
by evolution.

When organisms [[link removed]] die, their
molecules need to be broken down for reuse by other living things.

Such recycling of nutrients is necessary for new life to grow.

Now a study led by Professor Martin Cann of Durham University's
Department of Biosciences has shown that a type of E. coli bacteria
produces an enzyme which breaks the contents of their cells down into
nutrients after death. The dead bacteria are therefore offering a
banquet of nutrients to the cells that were their neighbors when they
were living.

The study has been published in _Nature Communications_.

Professor Cann said, "We typically think of death being the end, that
after something dies it just falls apart, rots and becomes a passive
target as it is scavenged for nutrients.

"But what this paper has demonstrated is that death is not the end of
the programmed biological processes that occur in an organism.

"Those processes continue after death, and they have evolved to do so.

"That is a fundamental rethink about how we view the death of an
organism."

Co-author Professor Wilson Poon, from the School of Physics and
Astronomy of the University of Edinburgh, inspired the research after
posing what he believed were some unanswered questions about why
organisms die the way they do.

The researchers assembled and realized they had stumbled across a
potentially new area of biology; processes that have evolved to
function after death.

Professor Cann said, "One problem remained; we couldn't work out how
an enzyme that functions after death could have evolved.

"Typically, we think of evolution acting on living organisms not dead
ones.

"The solution is that neighboring cells which gain nutrients from the
dead cells [[link removed]] are likely to be clonally
related to the dead cell.

"Consequently, the dead cell is giving nutrients to its relatives,
analogous to how animals will often help feed younger members of their
family group."

Co-author Professor Stuart West of the University of Oxford added,
"This is like nothing we have observed before—it is equivalent to a
dead meerkat suddenly turning into a pile of boiled eggs that the
other members of its group could eat."

The finding demonstrates that processes after death, like processes
during life, can be biologically programmed and subject to evolution.

Biomolecules that regulate processes after death might be exploited in
the future as novel targets for bacterial disease or as candidates to
enhance bacterial growth
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Professor Poon suggests that modeling such processes using the tools
of statistical physics may also provide design principles for humans
as we move towards a more circular economy in which recycling needs to
be built in from the beginning.

MORE INFORMATION: Bacteria encode post-mortem protein catabolism that
enables altruistic nutrient recycling, _Nature
Communications_ (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-56761-6
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JOURNAL INFORMATION: Nature Communications
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Provided by Durham University
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Her Discovery Wasn’t Alien Life, but Science Has Never Been the Same
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Sarah Scoles
New York Times
The internet erupted in controversy over Felisa Wolfe-Simon and
colleagues’ claim of a microbe thriving on arsenic. Nearly 15 years
later, she’s pursuing new research on the boundaries of life.
February 14, 2025

* Science
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* Evolution
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* biology
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* bacteria
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* death
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* life
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