ArticleGenome biology and evolution2020
Evolution of Mutation Rate in Astronomically Large Phytoplankton Populations.
Article in Genome biology and evolution, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Effect of cellular nutrient economy on the evolution of genome size in phytoplankton.Science advances · 2026Article
- Conceptualizing phytoplankton communities in the absence of resource based competitive exclusion.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Low Mutation Rate and Atypical Mutation Spectrum in Prasinoderma coloniale: Insights From an Early Diverging Green Lineage.Genome biology and evolution · 2025Article
- How does evolution work in superabundant microbes?Trends in microbiology · 2024Review
- Comparative Population Transcriptomics Provide New Insight into the Evolutionary History and Adaptive Potential of World Ocean Krill.Molecular biology and evolution · 2023Article
- Low Spontaneous Mutation Rate in Complex Multicellular Eukaryotes with a Haploid-Diploid Life Cycle.Molecular biology and evolution · 2023Article
- Rapid diversification underlying the global dominance of a cosmopolitan phytoplankton.The ISME journal · 2023Article
- Rampant nuclear-mitochondrial-plastid phylogenomic discordance in globally distributed calcifying microalgae.The New phytologist · 2022Article
- How Can We Resolve Lewontin's Paradox?Genome biology and evolution · 2022Article
- Phytoplankton biodiversity and the inverted paradox.ISME communications · 2021Article
- Temperature dependence of spontaneous mutation rates.Genome research · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Genetic diversity is expected to be proportional to population size, yet, there is a well-known, but unexplained lack of genetic diversity in large populations-the "Lewontin's paradox." Larger populations are expected to evolve lower mutation rates, which may help to explain this paradox. Here, we test this conjecture by measuring the spontaneous mutation rate in a ubiquitous unicellular marine phytoplankton species Emiliania huxleyi (Haptophyta) that has modest genetic diversity despite an astronomically large population size. Genome sequencing of E. huxleyi mutation accumulation lines revealed 455 mutations, with an unusual GC-biased mutation spectrum. This yielded an estimate of the per site mutation rate µ = 5.55×10-10 (CI 95%: 5.05×10-10 - 6.09×10-10), which corresponds to an effective population size Ne ∼ 2.7×106. Such a modest Ne is surprising for a ubiquitous and abundant species that accounts for up to 10% of global primary productivity in the oceans. Our results indicate that even exceptionally large populations do not evolve mutation rates lower than ∼10-10 per nucleotide per cell division. Consequently, the extreme disparity between modest genetic diversity and astronomically large population size in the plankton species cannot be explained by an unusually low mutation rate.
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