ArticleJournal of molecular evolution2017
Transposable Elements Mediate Adaptive Debilitation of Flagella in Experimental Escherichia coli Populations.
Article in Journal of molecular evolution, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
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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
8 citing papers in PubMed, 11 citations in OpenAlex.
- Metabolite correlation networks reveal complex phenotypes of adaptation-driving mutations.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Article
- Characterizing the ecological niche of insertion sequences within prokaryotic genomes.The ISME journal · 2026Article
- BlihIA-A Novel Type I Restriction-Modification System fromInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2025Article
- Experimental evolution ofMicrobiology spectrum · 2025Article
- Genetic and phenotypic analysis of the virulence plasmid of a non-Shigatoxigenic enteroaggregativeMicrobiology (Reading, England) · 2025Article
- The rapid evolution of flagellar ion selectivity in experimental populations ofScience advances · 2022Article
- Exploring the fitness benefits of genome reduction in Escherichia coli by a selection-driven approach.Scientific reports · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Although insertion sequence (IS) elements are generally considered genomic parasites, they can mediate adaptive genetic changes in bacterial genomes. We discovered that among 12 laboratory-evolved Escherichia coli populations, three had experienced at least six different IS1-mediated deletions of flagellar genes. These deletions all involved the master flagellar regulator flhDC, and as such completely incapacitate motility. Two lines of evidence strongly suggest that these deletions were adaptive in our evolution experiment: (1) parallel evolution in three independent populations is highly unlikely just by chance, and (2) one of these deletion mutations swept to fixation within ~1000 generations, which is over two million times faster than expected if this deletion was instead selectively neutral and thus evolving by genetic drift. Because flagella are energetically expensive to synthesize and operate, we suspect that debilitating their construction conferred a fitness advantage in our well-stirred evolution experiment. These findings underscore the important role that IS elements can play in mediating adaptive loss-of-function mutations in bacteria.
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Registered trials
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