Journal
NATURE
Volume 461, Issue 7268, Pages 1243-U74Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/nature08480
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Funding
- DARPA 'Fun Bio' Program
- US National Science Foundation
- Agence Nationale de la Recherche Programme 'Genomique Microbienne a Grande Echelle, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and Universite Joseph Fourier
- Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, Republic of Korea
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The relationship between rates of genomic evolution and organismal adaptation remains uncertain, despite considerable interest. The feasibility of obtaining genome sequences from experimentally evolving populations offers the opportunity to investigate this relationship with new precision. Here we sequence genomes sampled through 40,000 generations from a laboratory population of Escherichia coli. Although adaptation decelerated sharply, genomic evolution was nearly constant for 20,000 generations. Such clock-like regularity is usually viewed as the signature of neutral evolution, but several lines of evidence indicate that almost all of these mutations were beneficial. This same population later evolved an elevated mutation rate and accumulated hundreds of additional mutations dominated by a neutral signature. Thus, the coupling between genomic and adaptive evolution is complex and can be counterintuitive even in a constant environment. In particular, beneficial substitutions were surprisingly uniform over time, whereas neutral substitutions were highly variable.
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