Bottlenecks can constrain and channel evolutionary paths.

ABSTRACT: Population bottlenecks are commonplace in experimental evolution, specifically in serial passaging experiments where microbial populations alternate between growth and dilution. Natural populations also experience such fluctuations caused by seasonality, resource limitation, or host-to-host transmission for pathogens. Yet, how unlimited growth with periodic bottlenecks influence the adaptation of populations is not fully understood. Here, we study theoretically the effects of bottlenecks on the accessibility of evolutionary paths and on the rate of evolution. We model an asexual population evolving on a minimal fitness landscape consisting of two types of beneficial mutations with the empirically supported trade-off between mutation rate and fitness advantage, in the regime where multiple

SUBMITTER: Gamblin J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10213489 | biostudies-literature | 2023 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature