Competition-driven eco-evolutionary feedback reshapes bacteriophage lambda's fitness landscape and enables speciation.

ABSTRACT: A major challenge in evolutionary biology is explaining how populations navigate rugged fitness landscapes without getting trapped on local optima. One idea illustrated by adaptive dynamics theory is that as populations adapt, their newly enhanced capacities to exploit resources alter fitness payoffs and restructure the landscape in ways that promote speciation by opening new adaptive pathways. While there have been indirect tests of this theory, none have measured how fitness landscapes deform during adaptation, or test whether these shifts promote diversification. Here, we achieve this by studying bacteriophage λ, a virus that readily speciates into co-existing receptor specialists under controlled laboratory conditions. We used a high-throughput gene editing-phenotyping technology to me

SUBMITTER: Doud MB 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10461988 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature