ArticleEcology letters2016
Allele surfing promotes microbial adaptation from standing variation.
Article in Ecology letters, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 52 papers.
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Who cites it
52 citing papers in PubMed, 123 citations in OpenAlex.
- A microbial therapy-mimicry assay shows how spatial resource dynamics control resistance escape.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Biosurfactants direct the evolutionary dynamics of surface-associated microbial systems.Science advances · 2026Article
- Environmental redox conditions and strain variation define phenazine-mediated antagonism in co-infecting bacteria.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Genetically homogeneous sector morphologies emerge from anisotropic colony growth.Physical review. E · 2026Article
- Spatial structure: shaping the ecology and evolution of microbial communities.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2026Review
- Efficient mathematical methodology to determine multistep mutant burden in spatially growing cell populations.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Article
- Geometry-induced competitive release in a meta-population model of range expansions in disordered environments.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Factors that influence the caste ratio in a bacterial division of labour.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Growing bacterial colonies harness emergent genealogical demixing to regulate organizational entropy.Biophysical reports · 2024Article
- Quantifying the fractal complexity of nutrient transport channels inMicrobiology (Reading, England) · 2024Article
- Range expansions across landscapes with quenched noise.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Substrate geometry affects population dynamics in a bacterial biofilm.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Genome size variation and evolution during invasive range expansion in an introduced plant.Evolutionary applications · 2024Article
- Quantifying stochastic establishment of mutants in microbial adaptation.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2023Review
- Timing of antibiotic administration determines the spread of plasmid-encoded antibiotic resistance during microbial range expansion.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Proliferating active matter.Nature reviews. Physics · 2023Review
- State-dependent evolutionary models reveal modes of solid tumour growth.Nature ecology & evolution · 2023Article
- Impact of crowding on the diversity of expanding populations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Evolutionary rescue of resistant mutants is governed by a balance between radial expansion and selection in compact populations.Nature communications · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
The coupling of ecology and evolution during range expansions enables mutations to establish at expanding range margins and reach high frequencies. This phenomenon, called allele surfing, is thought to have caused revolutions in the gene pool of many species, most evidently in microbial communities. It has remained unclear, however, under which conditions allele surfing promotes or hinders adaptation. Here, using microbial experiments and simulations, we show that, starting with standing adaptive variation, range expansions generate a larger increase in mean fitness than spatially uniform population expansions. The adaptation gain results from 'soft' selective sweeps emerging from surfing beneficial mutations. The rate of these surfing events is shown to sensitively depend on the strength of genetic drift, which varies among strains and environmental conditions. More generally, allele surfing promotes the rate of adaptation per biomass produced, which could help developing biofilms and other resource-limited populations to cope with environmental challenges.
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