Experimental Evolution of Metabolic Dependency in Bacteria.

ABSTRACT: Bacteria frequently lose biosynthetic genes, thus making them dependent on an environmental uptake of the corresponding metabolite. Despite the ubiquity of this 'genome streamlining', it is generally unclear whether the concomitant loss of biosynthetic functions is favored by natural selection or rather caused by random genetic drift. Here we demonstrate experimentally that a loss of metabolic functions is strongly selected for when the corresponding metabolites can be derived from the environment. Serially propagating replicate populations of the bacterium Escherichia coli in amino acid-containing environments revealed that auxotrophic genotypes rapidly evolved in less than 2,000 generations in almost all replicate populations. Moreover, auxotrophs also evolved in environments lacking ami

SUBMITTER: D'Souza G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5096674 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature