Altruistic cell death and collective drug resistance

Mol Syst Biol. 8: 627The Greek myth of Castor and Pollux is a tale about altruism between brothers. Castor and Pollux were twins but they had different fathers. As a son of the god Zeus, Pollux was immortal, but Castor whose father was human, eventually died. Pollux could not bear grief and asked Zeus to share his immortality with his brother or even to give it away and join him in death. Moved by Pollux's altruism, Zeus decided to make them both immortals. In their recent work, Tanouchi et al (2012 examined programmed death in bacterial cells. They show it can too be an altruistic trait, whereby some cells trigger the cell death program and release stress‐relieving substances that increase the chances of survival of other cells within the population.Bacterial drug resistance is a major problem for human health (Taubes, 2008) and recent studies suggest that altruism can play an important role in resistant populations. For example, Lee et al observed that most individual bacteria within an antibiotic‐resistant population can be significantly more sensitive to the antibiotic than the global population (Lee et al , 2010). This paradoxical effect has a surprising explanation: a small number of …