ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2013
Experiments on the role of deleterious mutations as stepping stones in adaptive evolution.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 43 papers.
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43 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Synergistic epistasis among cancer drivers can rescue early tumors from the accumulation of deleterious passengers.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Transcriptome-based strategies for identifying aluminum tolerance genes in popcorn (Zea mays L. var. everta).Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Ontology for the Avida digital evolution platform.Scientific data · 2023Article
- Impact of population size on early adaptation in rugged fitness landscapes.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- avidaR: an R library to perform complex queries on an ontology-based database of digital organisms.PeerJ. Computer science · 2023Article
- Transposable elements maintain genome-wide heterozygosity in inbred populations.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Standing Genetic Diversity and Transmission Bottleneck Size Drive Adaptation in Bacteriophage Qβ.International journal of molecular sciences · 2022Article
- Population genetics of clonally transmissible cancers.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Review
- The relative fitness of the de novo variants in general Lithuanian population vs. in individuals with intellectual disability.European journal of human genetics : EJHG · 2022Article
- The cost of evolved constitutiveEcology and evolution · 2021Article
- Genetic interaction network has a very limited impact on the evolutionary trajectories in continuous culture-grown populations of yeast.BMC ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Bridging Tumorigenesis and Therapy Resistance With a Non-Darwinian and Non-Lamarckian Mechanism of Adaptive Evolution.Frontiers in oncology · 2021Article
- Effect of Salt Stress on Mutation and Genetic Architecture for Fitness Components inG3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2020Article
- Gene Loss Predictably Drives Evolutionary Adaptation.Molecular biology and evolution · 2020Article
- Crossing fitness valleys via double substitutions within codons.BMC biology · 2019Article
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- Network hubs affect evolvability.PLoS biology · 2019Article
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4 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Many evolutionary studies assume that deleterious mutations necessarily impede adaptive evolution. However, a later mutation that is conditionally beneficial may interact with a deleterious predecessor before it is eliminated, thereby providing access to adaptations that might otherwise be inaccessible. It is unknown whether such sign-epistatic recoveries are inconsequential events or an important factor in evolution, owing to the difficulty of monitoring the effects and fates of all mutations during experiments with biological organisms. Here, we used digital organisms to compare the extent of adaptive evolution in populations when deleterious mutations were disallowed with control populations in which such mutations were allowed. Significantly higher fitness levels were achieved over the long term in the control populations because some of the deleterious mutations served as stepping stones across otherwise impassable fitness valleys. As a consequence, initially deleterious mutations facilitated the evolution of complex, beneficial functions. We also examined the effects of disallowing neutral mutations, of varying the mutation rate, and of sexual recombination. Populations evolving without neutral mutations were able to leverage deleterious and compensatory mutation pairs to overcome, at least partially, the absence of neutral mutations. Substantially raising or lowering the mutation rate reduced or eliminated the long-term benefit of deleterious mutations, but introducing recombination did not. Our work demonstrates that deleterious mutations can play an important role in adaptive evolution under at least some conditions.
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