ArticleeLife2019
Environmental heterogeneity can tip the population genetics of range expansions.
Article in eLife, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed.
- Biosurfactants direct the evolutionary dynamics of surface-associated microbial systems.Science advances · 2026Article
- Article
- Spatial structure: shaping the ecology and evolution of microbial communities.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2026Review
- Harnessing droplet microfluidics and morphology-based deep learning for the label-free study of polymicrobial-phage interactions.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Efficient mathematical methodology to determine multistep mutant burden in spatially growing cell populations.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Geometry-induced competitive release in a meta-population model of range expansions in disordered environments.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Range expansions across landscapes with quenched noise.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Higher-order interactions and emergent properties of microbial communities: The power of synthetic ecology.Heliyon · 2024Review
- Substrate geometry affects population dynamics in a bacterial biofilm.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Range expansion can promote the evolution of plastic generalism in coarse-grained landscapes.Evolution letters · 2024Article
- Active layer dynamics drives a transition to biofilm fingering.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2023Article
- Vertical growth dynamics of biofilms.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Article
- Innovation versus novelty in microbial systems.Environmental microbiology · 2023Article
- Mechanisms driving spatial distribution of residents in colony biofilms: an interdisciplinary perspective.Open biology · 2022Review
- Population genetic models for the spatial spread of adaptive variants: A review in light of SARS-CoV-2 evolution.PLoS genetics · 2022Review
- Growth instabilities shape morphology and genetic diversity of microbial colonies.Physical biology · 2022Article
- The collective effect of finite-sized inhomogeneities on the spatial spread of populations in two dimensions.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2021Article
- Mutability of demographic noise in microbial range expansions.The ISME journal · 2021Article
- Causes and consequences of pattern diversification in a spatially self-organizing microbial community.The ISME journal · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The population genetics of most range expansions is thought to be shaped by the competition between Darwinian selection and random genetic drift at the range margins. Here, we show that the evolutionary dynamics during range expansions is highly sensitive to additional fluctuations induced by environmental heterogeneities. Tracking mutant clones with a tunable fitness effect in bacterial colonies grown on randomly patterned surfaces we found that environmental heterogeneity can dramatically reduce the efficacy of selection. Time-lapse microscopy and computer simulations suggest that this effect arises generically from a local 'pinning' of the expansion front, whereby stretches of the front are slowed down on a length scale that depends on the structure of the environmental heterogeneity. This pinning focuses the range expansion into a small number of 'lucky' individuals with access to expansion paths, altering the neutral evolutionary dynamics and increasing the importance of chance relative to selection.
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Registered trials
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