Journal
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL ZOOLOGY PART B-MOLECULAR AND DEVELOPMENTAL EVOLUTION
Volume 326, Issue 1, Pages 31-37Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1002/jez.b.22662
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR) [60A06-1020/13]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Theoretical and computational studies predict a positive role for widespread phenotype resistance to genetic mutation, or phenotype mutational robustness, in enhancing adaptation to novel environments through the accumulation of cryptic genetic variation. However, this has not been verified through experimental evolution in biological systems at the level of whole organisms. In a short-term evolution experiment of about 250 generations, we studied the adaptive performances of independently evolving populations of the bacterium Escherichia coli in two new nutritional environments, represented by minimal media with either lactate or glycerol as the sole carbon source. At the start of the experiments, all populations expressed identical phenotype, while differing for the amount of cryptic genetic variation, artificially produced by mutagenesis. We found that cryptic genetic variation can promote significantly faster adaptation to a new nutritional environment in E. coli. The scale of this effect varies between the two environments, and correlates with an estimation of the phenotype robustness of the ability to grow in a given medium, based on survival rate after mutagenesis in the same medium. J. Exp. Zool. (Mol. Dev. Evol.) 326B:31-37, 2016. (c) 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available