Deliberate slow growth could explain bacteria survival strategies

Escherichia coli (E. coli) are mostly harmless bacteria that live in the intestines of animals and humans.

They are the most well-studied bacteria and, often, when scientists discover something about E. coli, they extrapolate that discovery across all bacteria.

So when scientists learned that E. coli allocates its resources to grow as fast as the environment allows, it was assumed all bacteria behaved similarly. ...