ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Evolutionary stalling and a limit on the power of natural selection to improve a cellular module.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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19 citing papers in PubMed, 33 citations in OpenAlex.
- Module-Selection Balance in the Evolution of Modular Organisms.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Idiosyncratic evolvability among single-point ribosomal mutants towards multi-aminoglycoside resistance.PLoS genetics · 2025Article
- The origins and evolution of translation factors.Trends in genetics : TIG · 2025Review
- Highly parallelized laboratory evolution of wine yeasts for enhanced metabolic phenotypes.Molecular systems biology · 2024Article
- Fitness benefits of a synonymous substitution in an ancient EF-Tu gene depend on the genetic background.Journal of bacteriology · 2024Article
- The modular biochemical reaction network structure of cellular translation.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2023Article
- Exploring the expanse between theoretical questions and experimental approaches in the modern study of evolvability.Journal of experimental zoology. Part B, Molecular and developmental evolution · 2023Article
- Early divergence of translation initiation and elongation factors.Protein science : a publication of the Protein Society · 2022Article
- Reversion is most likely under high mutation supply when compensatory mutations do not fully restore fitness costs.G3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2022Article
- Discovery of positive and purifying selection in metagenomic time series of hypermutator microbial populations.PLoS genetics · 2022Article
- Asymptotic burnout and homeostatic awakening: a possible solution to the Fermi paradox?Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- An Integrated Method to Reconstruct Ancient Proteins.Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2022Article
- Article
- Changes in the distribution of fitness effects and adaptive mutational spectra following a single first step towards adaptation.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Cofactors are Remnants of Life's Origin and Early Evolution.Journal of molecular evolution · 2021Article
- Article
- Mutation bias can shape adaptation in large asexual populations experiencing clonal interference.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Supersized Ribosomal RNA Expansion Segments in Asgard Archaea.Genome biology and evolution · 2020Article
- Evolutionary Repair Experiments as a Window to the Molecular Diversity of Life.Current biology : CB · 2020Review
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5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cells consist of molecular modules which perform vital biological functions. Cellular modules are key units of adaptive evolution because organismal fitness depends on their performance. Theory shows that in rapidly evolving populations, such as those of many microbes, adaptation is driven primarily by common beneficial mutations with large effects, while other mutations behave as if they are effectively neutral. As a consequence, if a module can be improved only by rare and/or weak beneficial mutations, its adaptive evolution would stall. However, such evolutionary stalling has not been empirically demonstrated, and it is unclear to what extent stalling may limit the power of natural selection to improve modules. Here we empirically characterize how natural selection improves the translation machinery (TM), an essential cellular module. We experimentally evolved populations of
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