Factors That Make Bacteria More Modular Detailed

Many bacteria break their metabolic processes into chunks. That may be logically tidy, but it's often metabolically inefficient. Researchers have now figured out the factors that tend to make bacteria more modular. Researchers constructed metabolic networks of many species of bacteria and measured how much those networks broke into pieces, or modules. They found that large networks involving many different enzymes tended to be more modular. Also, bacteria that tend to live in many different environments are generally more modular. Finally, the researchers found that modularity decreases over generations.

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