ArticleNature microbiology2019
Chance and pleiotropy dominate genetic diversity in complex bacterial environments.
Article in Nature microbiology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 31 citations in OpenAlex.
- Interaction between mutation type and gene pleiotropy drives parallel evolution in the laboratory.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Pooled it
- Evolutionary mechanisms underlying bacterial adaptation to the plant environment.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2026Review
- A promiscuous Bcd amino acid dehydrogenase promotes biofilm development in Bacillus subtilis.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2025Article
- The Biofilm Lifestyle Shapes the Evolution of β-Lactamases.Genome biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Convergent genetic adaptation ofFrontiers in molecular biosciences · 2024Article
- Whole-genome sequences from wild-type and laboratory-evolved strains define the alleleome and establish its hallmarks.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Fitness and Functional Landscapes of the E. coli RNase III Gene rnc.Molecular biology and evolution · 2023Article
- Mechanisms driving spatial distribution of residents in colony biofilms: an interdisciplinary perspective.Open biology · 2022Review
- Mechanisms of protein evolution.Protein science : a publication of the Protein Society · 2022Review
- Environmental selection and epistasis in an empirical phenotype-environment-fitness landscape.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Article
- A complex struggle for direction.Nature chemical biology · 2022Article
- Bacillus subtilis biofilm formation and social interactions.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2021Review
- The adaptive landscape of a metallo-enzyme is shaped by environment-dependent epistasis.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Article
- Collateral fitness effects of mutations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- MaveDB: an open-source platform to distribute and interpret data from multiplexed assays of variant effect.Genome biology · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
How does environmental complexity affect the evolution of single genes? Here, we measured the effects of a set of Bacillus subtilis glutamate dehydrogenase mutants across 19 different environments-from phenotypically homogeneous single-cell populations in liquid media to heterogeneous biofilms, plant roots and soil populations. The effects of individual gene mutations on organismal fitness were highly reproducible in liquid cultures. However, 84% of the tested alleles showed opposing fitness effects under different growth conditions (sign environmental pleiotropy). In colony biofilms and soil samples, different alleles dominated in parallel replica experiments. Accordingly, we found that in these heterogeneous cell populations the fate of mutations was dictated by a combination of selection and drift. The latter relates to programmed prophage excisions that occurred during biofilm development. Overall, for each condition, a wide range of glutamate dehydrogenase mutations persisted and sometimes fixated as a result of the combined action of selection, pleiotropy and chance. However, over longer periods and in multiple environments, nearly all of this diversity would be lost-across all the environments and conditions that we tested, the wild type was the fittest allele.
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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.