Expert: Fatih Kocabas - 10/3/2007

Question
why does a nutritionally deprived bacterial cell spend most of its life in a diploid condition?

Answer
That`s an important point!
They are normally haploid but they are remain in diploid condition when there is not enough food. Because a nutritianally deperived condition causes stress on the bacteria and during stressful condition mutation rate increases to increase number of positive mutations so that increase survival. In addition, bacteria can repair mutated strands, and double strand breaks when there is another copy of the mutatated site and this is possible via homologous recombination mechanism using another copy of the gene. Thus, bacteria prefer diploid state due to availability of homologous recombination using diploid genome.

Good question!