And wouldn’t you expect those fitness defects to evolve away over time reasonably well? Seems like the kind of thing that would be a ton of individually minor distributional shifts which would have normal selection gradients over them, if you had a decent population running for a while?
Plus now they don’t have to maintain their usual set of anti-viral defenses, which probably frees up a lot of novel design options, plus some genetic space and metabolic resources? I’d mostly expect that within a year or two of large-population (say a large scale commercial bioreactor) they strongly out-compete normal bacteria.
ops, yup, fixed link.
And wouldn’t you expect those fitness defects to evolve away over time reasonably well? Seems like the kind of thing that would be a ton of individually minor distributional shifts which would have normal selection gradients over them, if you had a decent population running for a while?
Plus now they don’t have to maintain their usual set of anti-viral defenses, which probably frees up a lot of novel design options, plus some genetic space and metabolic resources? I’d mostly expect that within a year or two of large-population (say a large scale commercial bioreactor) they strongly out-compete normal bacteria.