ArticlePLoS genetics2018
High mutation rates limit evolutionary adaptation in Escherichia coli.
Article in PLoS genetics, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 51 papers.
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Who cites it
51 citing papers in PubMed.
- The unique role ofmBio · 2026Article
- The role of environmental stress in promoting mutators through evolutionary rescue: quantitative predictions.Genetics · 2025Article
- Antimutator and Mutational Spectrum Effects Can Combine to Reduce Evolutionary Potential in Escherichia coli ΔnudJ.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Genome wide analyses reveal the role of mutator phenotypes in Mycobacterium tuberculosis drug resistance emergence.npj antimicrobials and resistance · 2025Article
- Quantitative analysis of relationship between mutation rate and speed of adaptation under antibiotic exposure in Escherichia coli.PLoS genetics · 2025Article
- Evolution takes multiple paths to evolvability when facing environmental change.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Reciprocal transplantation experiments reveal local adaptation of seaweed-associated bacteria.ISME communications · 2025Article
- Navigating Host Immunity and Concurrent Ozone Stress: Strain-Resolved Metagenomics Reveals Maintenance of Intraspecific Diversity and Genetic Variation inEvolutionary applications · 2025Article
- Genome and transcriptomic analysis of the adaptation ofComputational and structural biotechnology journal · 2024Review
- Collective peroxide detoxification determines microbial mutation rate plasticity in E. coli.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Effects of urban-induced mutations on ecology, evolution and health.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Review
- Genetic Alternatives for Experimental Adaptation to Colistin in ThreeAntibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Mutational Signatures in Wild Type Escherichia coli Strains Reveal Predominance of DNA Polymerase Errors.Genome biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Hypermutator emergence in experimentalEvolution letters · 2023Article
- Dynamic basis for dA•dGTP and dA•d8OGTP misincorporation via Hoogsteen base pairs.Nature chemical biology · 2023Article
- Evolution of Resistance to Irinotecan in Cancer Cells Involves Generation of Topoisomerase-Guided Mutations in Non-Coding Genome That Reduce the Chances of DNA Breaks.International journal of molecular sciences · 2023Article
- Increased male investment in sperm competition results in reduced maintenance of gametes.PLoS biology · 2023Article
- Accelerated Adaptive Laboratory Evolution by Automated Repeated Batch Processes in Parallelized Bioreactors.Microorganisms · 2023Article
- Minireview: Engineering evolution to reconfigure phenotypic traits in microbes for biotechnological applications.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2023Review
- Efflux-linked accelerated evolution of antibiotic resistance at a population edge.Molecular cell · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Mutation is fundamental to evolution, because it generates the genetic variation on which selection can act. In nature, genetic changes often increase the mutation rate in systems that range from viruses and bacteria to human tumors. Such an increase promotes the accumulation of frequent deleterious or neutral alleles, but it can also increase the chances that a population acquires rare beneficial alleles. Here, we study how up to 100-fold increases in Escherichia coli's genomic mutation rate affect adaptive evolution. To do so, we evolved multiple replicate populations of asexual E. coli strains engineered to have four different mutation rates for 3000 generations in the laboratory. We measured the ability of evolved populations to grow in their original environment and in more than 90 novel chemical environments. In addition, we subjected the populations to whole genome population sequencing. Although populations with higher mutation rates accumulated greater genetic diversity, this diversity conveyed benefits only for modestly increased mutation rates, where populations adapted faster and also thrived better than their ancestors in some novel environments. In contrast, some populations at the highest mutation rates showed reduced adaptation during evolution, and failed to thrive in all of the 90 alternative environments. In addition, they experienced a dramatic decrease in mutation rate. Our work demonstrates that the mutation rate changes the global balance between deleterious and beneficial mutational effects on fitness. In contrast to most theoretical models, our experiments suggest that this tipping point already occurs at the modest mutation rates that are found in the wild.
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