Heterozygote Advantage Is a Common Outcome of Adaptation in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

ABSTRACT: Adaptation in diploids is predicted to proceed via mutations that are at least partially dominant in fitness. Recently, we argued that many adaptive mutations might also be commonly overdominant in fitness. Natural (directional) selection acting on overdominant mutations should drive them into the population but then, instead of bringing them to fixation, should maintain them as balanced polymorphisms via heterozygote advantage. If true, this would make adaptive evolution in sexual diploids differ drastically from that of haploids. The validity of this prediction has not yet been tested experimentally. Here, we performed four replicate evolutionary experiments with diploid yeast populations (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) growing in glucose-limited continuous cultures. We sequenced 24 evolved c

SUBMITTER: Sellis D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4937471 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature