ArticleScience (New York, N.Y.)2012
Repeatability and contingency in the evolution of a key innovation in phage lambda.
Article in Science (New York, N.Y.), 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 265 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
265 citing papers in PubMed, 532 citations in OpenAlex.
- Stable coexistence and transport of lytic phage infections with migrating bacterial hosts.Science advances · 2026Article
- Genomic and functional divergence analysis of closely relatedApplied and environmental microbiology · 2026Article
- Temperate phages limit their own propagation under spatial constraint in biofilms on chitin.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Bacteriophage-bacteria coevolution: from molecular arms races to ecological and applied perspectives.Archives of microbiology · 2026Review
- Capsular Polysaccharide Safeguards a Prophage-Bacterium Symbiosis by Preventing Collateral Attack and Promoting Viral Transmission.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Cross-family and phage-specific gene requirements for Klebsiella infection revealed by scalable RB-TnSeq genetic screens.PLoS genetics · 2026Article
- Tail spike protein evolution enables phage Psm140 to target Salmonella ShdA and overcome host resistance.Poultry science · 2026Article
- Eco-evolutionary dynamics of massive, parallel bacteriophage outbreaks in compost communities.Science advances · 2026Article
- Single nucleotide variants drive evolutionary phage-host arms race in anaerobic carbon dioxide-converting microbiome.Nature communications · 2026Article
- In vitro concentration-dependent inhibition of early biofilm formation by Staphylococcus aureus isolated from dairy cattle using a bacteriophage cocktail.BMC veterinary research · 2026Article
- Actually, what is a gain-of-function mutation?Genetics · 2026Article
- Diversity-generating retroelements for programmable targeted hypermutagenesis.Nature biotechnology · 2026Article
- Capsular specificity in temperate phages of Klebsiella pneumoniae is driven by diverse receptor-binding enzymes.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Sequential Phage Delivery Can Outperform Cocktails by Delaying Cross-Resistance Evolution.Viruses · 2026Article
- Steering the course: targeting and exploiting surface receptors in phage therapy.Journal of bacteriology · 2026Review
- Oxidative stress constrains evolution of bacteriophage host-range diversity.The ISME journal · 2026Article
- The Zoetrope effect in phage evolution.Frontiers in microbiology · 2026Article
- Adaptive laboratory evolution ofFrontiers in microbiology · 2026Article
- Rational design of a hospital-specific phage cocktail to treat Enterobacter cloacae complex infections.Nature microbiology · 2025Article
- Abiotic environmental conditions determine phage resistance outcomes in a salt-marsh bacterium.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
205 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
The processes responsible for the evolution of key innovations, whereby lineages acquire qualitatively new functions that expand their ecological opportunities, remain poorly understood. We examined how a virus, bacteriophage λ, evolved to infect its host, Escherichia coli, through a novel pathway. Natural selection promoted the fixation of mutations in the virus's host-recognition protein, J, that improved fitness on the original receptor, LamB, and set the stage for other mutations that allowed infection through a new receptor, OmpF. These viral mutations arose after the host evolved reduced expression of LamB, whereas certain other host mutations prevented the phage from evolving the new function. This study shows the complex interplay between genomic processes and ecological conditions that favor the emergence of evolutionary innovations.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.