ArticleNature communications2022
Environmental complexity is more important than mutation in driving the evolution of latent novel traits in E. coli.
Article in Nature communications, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Simulating the host niche: balancing complexity and control in the experimental evolution of antibiotic resistance and pathoadaptation.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2026Review
- Phylogenetic characterisation, virulence factors, and multi-drug resistance of Escherichia coli strains isolated from faeces of feral pigeons (Columba Livia forma urbana).Irish veterinary journal · 2025Article
- Rapid and Integrated Bacterial Evolution Analysis unveils gene mutations and clinical risk of Klebsiella pneumoniae.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Strain-specific metabarcoding reveals rapid evolution of copper tolerance in populations of the coastal diatom Skeletonema marinoi.Molecular ecology · 2024Article
- Tracing the possible evolutionary trends ofmSystems · 2024Article
- Evolutionary Implications of Self-Assembling Cybernetic Materials with Collective Problem-Solving Intelligence at Multiple Scales.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Chance Favors the Prepared Genomes: Horizontal Transfer Shapes the Emergence of Antibiotic Resistance Mutations in Core Genes.Molecular biology and evolution · 2023Article
- ShinyBioHEAT: an interactive shiny app to identify phenotype driver genes in E.coli and B.subtilis.Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Recent experiments show that adaptive Darwinian evolution in one environment can lead to the emergence of multiple new traits that provide no immediate benefit in this environment. Such latent non-adaptive traits, however, can become adaptive in future environments. We do not know whether mutation or environment-driven selection is more important for the emergence of such traits. To find out, we evolve multiple wild-type and mutator E. coli populations under two mutation rates in simple (single antibiotic) environments and in complex (multi-antibiotic) environments. We then assay the viability of evolved populations in dozens of new environments and show that all populations become viable in multiple new environments different from those they had evolved in. The number of these new environments increases with environmental complexity but not with the mutation rate. Genome sequencing demonstrates the reason: Different environments affect pleiotropic mutations differently. Our experiments show that the selection pressure provided by an environment can be more important for the evolution of novel traits than the mutational supply experienced by a wild-type and a mutator strain of E. coli.
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