ArticleBMC evolutionary biology2011
Mutator dynamics in sexual and asexual experimental populations of yeast.
Article in BMC evolutionary biology, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed.
- Wanted: A population genetic theory of biological noise regulation.PLoS genetics · 2026Article
- The role of environmental stress in promoting mutators through evolutionary rescue: quantitative predictions.Genetics · 2025Article
- Evolvability-enhancing mutations in the fitness landscapes of an RNA and a protein.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Adaptive evolvability through direct selection instead of indirect, second-order selection.Journal of experimental zoology. Part B, Molecular and developmental evolution · 2022Review
- Recent insights into the evolution of mutation rates in yeast.Current opinion in genetics & development · 2022Review
- Reversion is most likely under high mutation supply when compensatory mutations do not fully restore fitness costs.G3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2022Article
- Review
- The fitness cost of mismatch repair mutators in Saccharomyces cerevisiae: partitioning the mutational load.Heredity · 2020Article
- It's not magic - Hsp90 and its effects on genetic and epigenetic variation.Seminars in cell & developmental biology · 2019Review
- Old Trade, New Tricks: Insights into the Spontaneous Mutation Process from the Partnering of Classical Mutation Accumulation Experiments with High-Throughput Genomic Approaches.Genome biology and evolution · 2019Review
- Incompatibilities in Mismatch Repair GenesGenetics · 2018Article
- Sign of selection on mutation rate modifiers depends on population size.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- Sexual recombination and increased mutation rate expedite evolution of Escherichia coli in varied fitness landscapes.Nature communications · 2017Article
- Evolving mutation rate advances the invasion speed of a sexual species.BMC evolutionary biology · 2017Article
- Known mutator alleles do not markedly increase mutation rate in clinicalProceedings. Biological sciences · 2017Article
- Dynamics and Fate of Beneficial Mutations Under Lineage Contamination by Linked Deleterious Mutations.Genetics · 2017Article
- Review
- The effect of population bottlenecks on mutation rate evolution in asexual populations.Journal of evolutionary biology · 2014Article
- Genome duplication and mutations in ACE2 cause multicellular, fast-sedimenting phenotypes in evolved Saccharomyces cerevisiae.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2013Article
- A trade-off between oxidative stress resistance and DNA repair plays a role in the evolution of elevated mutation rates in bacteria.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2013Article
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3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundIn asexual populations, mutators may be expected to hitchhike with associated beneficial mutations. In sexual populations, recombination is predicted to erode such associations, inhibiting mutator hitchhiking. To investigate the effect of recombination on mutators experimentally, we compared the frequency dynamics of a mutator allele (msh2Δ) in sexual and asexual populations of Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
resultsMutator strains increased in frequency at the expense of wild-type strains in all asexual diploid populations, with some approaching fixation in 150 generations of propagation. Over the same period of time, mutators declined toward loss in all corresponding sexual diploid populations as well as in haploid populations propagated asexually.
conclusionsWe report the first experimental investigation of mutator dynamics in sexual populations. We show that a strong mutator quickly declines in sexual populations while hitchhiking to high frequency in asexual diploid populations, as predicted by theory. We also show that the msh2Δ mutator has a high and immediate realized cost that is alone sufficient to explain its decline in sexual populations. We postulate that this cost is indirect; namely, that it is due to a very high rate of recessive lethal or strongly deleterious mutation. However, we cannot rule out the possibility that msh2Δ also has unknown directly deleterious effects on fitness, and that these effects may differ between haploid asexual and sexual populations. Despite these reservations, our results prompt us to speculate that the short-term cost of highly deleterious recessive mutations can be as important as recombination in preventing mutator hitchhiking in sexual populations.
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