Historical contingency in the evolution of antibiotic resistance after decades of relaxed selection.

ABSTRACT: Populations often encounter changed environments that remove selection for the maintenance of particular phenotypic traits. The resulting genetic decay of those traits under relaxed selection reduces an organism's fitness in its prior environment. However, whether and how such decay alters the subsequent evolvability of a population upon restoration of selection for a previously diminished trait is not well understood. We addressed this question using Escherichia coli strains from the long-term evolution experiment (LTEE) that independently evolved for multiple decades in the absence of antibiotics. We first confirmed that these derived strains are typically more sensitive to various antibiotics than their common ancestor. We then subjected the ancestral and derived strains to various conc

SUBMITTER: Card KJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6827916 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature