Interplay between pleiotropy and secondary selection determines rise and fall of mutators in stress response.

ABSTRACT: Mutators are clones whose mutation rate is about two to three orders of magnitude higher than the rate of wild-type clones and their roles in adaptive evolution of asexual populations have been controversial. Here we address this problem by using an ab initio microscopic model of living cells, which combines population genetics with a physically realistic presentation of protein stability and protein-protein interactions. The genome of model organisms encodes replication controlling genes (RCGs) and genes modeling the mismatch repair (MMR) complexes. The genotype-phenotype relationship posits that the replication rate of an organism is proportional to protein copy numbers of RCGs in their functional form and there is a production cost penalty for protein overexpression. The mutation rate d

SUBMITTER: Heo M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2837395 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature