{"doi":"10.1101/2020.02.23.961862","title":"Ecological memory preserves phage resistance mechanisms in bacteria","abstract":"Defense mechanisms against pathogens are prevalent in nature, and their maintenance is critical for long-term survival of a species. Such mechanisms, which include CRISPR-mediated immunity in bacteria and the R genes in plants, carry substantial costs to organisms and can be rapidly lost when pathogens are eliminated. How a species preserves its molecular defenses despite their costs, in the face of variable pathogen levels, and across an ecology of localized patches remains a major unsolved problem in epidemiology and evolutionary biology. Using techniques of game theory and non-linear dynamical systems, we show that by maintaining a non-zero failure rate of immunity, hosts sustain sufficient levels of pathogen across an ecology to select against loss of the defense. This resistance switching strategy is evolutionarily stable, and provides a powerful evolutionary mechanism that maintains host-pathogen interactions and enables co-evolutionary dynamics in a wide range of systems.","journal":"bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)","year":2020,"id":123473,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":3,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.949,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":440480,"name":"Edo Kussell","orcid":"0000-0003-0590-4036","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":566350,"name":"Antun Skanata","orcid":"0000-0002-6996-9923","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":54,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:14:59.547352Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}