Environmental memory alters the fitness effects of adaptive mutations in fluctuating environments.

ABSTRACT: Evolution in a static laboratory environment often proceeds via large-effect beneficial mutations that may become maladaptive in other environments. Conversely, natural settings require populations to endure environmental fluctuations. A sensible assumption is that the fitness of a lineage in a fluctuating environment is the time average of its fitness over the sequence of static conditions it encounters. However, transitions between conditions may pose entirely new challenges, which could cause deviations from this time average. To test this, we tracked hundreds of thousands of barcoded yeast lineages evolving in static and fluctuating conditions and subsequently isolated 900 mutants for pooled fitness assays in 15 environments. Here we find that fitness in fluctuating environments indeed

SUBMITTER: Abreu CI 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11853131 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature