Hedging their bets: how bacterial pathogens diversify to survive infection

Phenotypic heterogeneity within isogenic bacterial populations represents a fundamental adaptation strategy that enables pathogen survival across the selective pressures of host infection. Rather than uniformly responding to environmental challenges, bacterial populations diversify through mechanisms including phase variation, stochastic gene expression, asymmetric cell division, and intercellular communication, generating functionally specialized subpopulations that operate through bet-hedging