We all must play the game of life with the cards we’re dealt, so the common aphorism goes. In biology, this means organisms must compete through natural selection with the genes and anatomy they were born with.

But the saying is a lie.

Okay, it’s not exactly a lie, but modern research suggests that the game of life is far more complicated than we had anticipated. There are opportunities to swap cards and even steal other players’ hands.

Researchers at UC Santa Barbara have been investigating the effects of this strategy, particularly the ability to acquire metabolic pathways. The scientists found that adopting another metabolism can have major competitive consequences, with ramifications to a species’ evolution and ecology. The results appear in the journal Ecology(link is external).

The term “metabolism” encompasses all the chemical reactions that take place in an organism in order to maintain life. For animals, this includes the nuts and bolts of processes like respiration, digestion, movement, etc. An acquired metabolism is a metabolic pathway that is not encoded in an organism’s DNA.