The role of environmental stress in promoting mutators through evolutionary rescue: quantitative predictions.

ABSTRACT: The role of mutation rate in evolutionary rescue has been extensively explored, but little work has investigated how evolutionary rescue can promote mutators, lineages with higher mutation rates. Under complete linkage, we investigate the likelihood of evolutionary rescue on a mutator background that either emerges de novo or pre-exists in the population prior to a severe environmental change. If such an evolutionary rescue event occurs, the mutator lineage sweeps into the population, and thus the environmental stress has promoted mutators. Our findings indicate that mutation rate evolution can substantially boost rescue probabilities, but stronger mutators are most effective when the wildtype has a low mutation rate, while their advantage diminishes for higher wildtype mutation rates. Int

SUBMITTER: Tuffaha MZ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12709047 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature