ArticleNature ecology & evolution2020
Antagonistic pleiotropy conceals molecular adaptations in changing environments.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 30 papers.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed, 64 citations in OpenAlex.
- Unicellular and Multicellular Modes of Selection Impose Distinct Constraints on Cellular Phenotype Evolution.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Spontaneous mutation rate and spectrum are modulated by organismal fitness.Science advances · 2026Article
- Pleiotropy and the evolutionary stability of plastic phenotypes: a geometric framework.G3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2026Article
- Adaptive tracking with antagonistic pleiotropy results in seemingly neutral molecular evolution.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Deep mutational scans clarify the record of evolution.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Functional synonymous mutations and their evolutionary consequences.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2025Review
- Coevolutionary history of predation constrains the evolvability of antibiotic resistance in prey bacteria.npj antimicrobials and resistance · 2025Article
- Understanding, inhibiting, and engineering membrane transporters with high-throughput mutational screens.Cell chemical biology · 2025Review
- Context-dependent change in the fitness effect of (in)organic phosphate antiporter glpT during Salmonella Typhimurium infection.Nature communications · 2025Article
- The loci of environmental adaptation in a model eukaryote.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Genomic determinants, architecture, and constraints in drought-related traits in Corymbia calophylla.BMC genomics · 2024Article
- Biotic interactions promote local adaptation to soil in plants.Nature communications · 2024Article
- The evolutionary genomics of adaptation to stress in wild rhizobium bacteria.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Reduced social function in experimentally evolvedProceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Effective fitness under fluctuating selection with genetic drift.G3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2023Article
- Patterns and evolutionary consequences of pleiotropy.Annual review of ecology, evolution, and systematics · 2023Article
- Bacterial-fungal interactions promote parallel evolution of global transcriptional regulators in a widespread Staphylococcus species.The ISME journal · 2023Article
- Review
- Rapid evolutionary repair by secondary perturbation of a primary disrupted transcriptional network.EMBO reports · 2023Article
- What Has Genomics Taught An Evolutionary Biologist?Genomics, proteomics & bioinformatics · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
The importance of positive selection in molecular evolution is debated. Evolution experiments under invariant laboratory conditions typically show a higher rate of nonsynonymous nucleotide changes than the rate of synonymous changes, demonstrating prevalent molecular adaptations. Natural evolution inferred from genomic comparisons, however, almost always exhibits the opposite pattern even among closely related conspecifics, which is indicative of a paucity of positive selection. Here we hypothesize that this apparent contradiction is at least in part attributable to ubiquitous and frequent environmental changes in nature, causing nonsynonymous mutations that are beneficial at one time to become deleterious soon after because of antagonistic pleiotropy and hindering their fixations relative to synonymous mutations despite continued population adaptations. To test this hypothesis, we performed yeast evolution experiments in changing and corresponding constant environments, followed by genome sequencing of the evolving populations. We observed a lower nonsynonymous to synonymous rate ratio in antagonistic changing environments than in the corresponding constant environments, and the population dynamics of mutations supports our hypothesis. These findings and the accompanying population genetic simulations suggest that molecular adaptation is consistently underestimated in nature due to the antagonistic fitness effects of mutations in changing environments.
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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.