Mutations in global regulators lead to metabolic selection during adaptation to complex environments.

ABSTRACT: Adaptation to ecologically complex environments can provide insights into the evolutionary dynamics and functional constraints encountered by organisms during natural selection. Adaptation to a new environment with abundant and varied resources can be difficult to achieve by small incremental changes if many mutations are required to achieve even modest gains in fitness. Since changing complex environments are quite common in nature, we investigated how such an epistatic bottleneck can be avoided to allow rapid adaptation. We show that adaptive mutations arise repeatedly in independently evolved populations in the context of greatly increased genetic and phenotypic diversity. We go on to show that weak selection requiring substantial metabolic reprogramming can be readily achieved by mutat

SUBMITTER: Saxer G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4263409 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature