DOI
10.1038/ng.110

Summary
This publication investigates a classic problem in population and evolutionary biology which is that of the understanding of how a population optimizes its fitness in fluctuating environments. One hypotheses suggests that a population might enhance its fitness by allowing individual cells to stochastically transition among multiple phenotypes, thus ensuring that some cells are always prepared for an unforeseen environmental fluctuation. In this publication the researchers empirically observed that when comparing the growth of two populations with different switching rates the fast-switching populations outgrow slow switchers when the environment fluctuates rapidly, whereas slow-switching phenotypes outgrow fast switchers when the

Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
This study deals with a complex problem concerning population and evolutionary biology which tries to understand how a population optimizes its fitness in fluctuating environments.

Point of Strength
This study experimentally explored how switching affects population growth by selecting the galactose utilization network of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The point of strength of this study lies in the approach used and on the choice of the model used. Besides being a fully investigated pathway, the galactose gene network was also selected because the switching rates between the two phenotypic states can be tuned experimentally. They were able to explore this important growth dynamics tanks to the engineering of a strain that can randomly transition between two phenotypes as a result of stochastic gene expression. They then compared the growth of two populations with different switching rates.