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Selection affects genes involved in replication during long-term evolution in experimental populations of the bacteriophage ?X174.

ABSTRACT: Observing organisms that evolve in response to strong selection over very short time scales allows the determination of the molecular mechanisms underlying adaptation. Although dissecting these molecular mechanisms is expensive and time-consuming, general patterns can be detected from repeated experiments, illuminating the biological processes involved in evolutionary adaptation. The bacteriophage ?X174 was grown for 50 days in replicate chemostats under two culture conditions: Escherichia coli C as host growing at 37°C and Salmonella typhimurium as host growing at 43.5°C. After 50 days, greater than 20 substitutions per chemostat had risen to detectable levels. Of the 97 substitutions, four occurred in all four chemostats, five arose in both culture conditions, eight arose in only the high temperature S. typhimurium chemostats, and seven arose only in the E. coli chemostats. The remaining substitutions were detected only in a single chemostat, however, almost half of these have been seen in other similar experiments. Our findings support previous studies that host recognition and capsid stability are two biological processes that are modified during adaptation to novel hosts and high temperature. Based upon the substitutions shared across both environments, it is apparent that genome replication and packaging are also affected during adaptation to the chemostat environment, rather than to temperature or host per se. This environment is characterized by a large number of phage and very few hosts, leading to competition among phage within the host. We conclude from these results that adaptation to a high density environment selects for changes in genome replication at both protein and DNA sequence levels.

SUBMITTER: Brown CJ

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3606162 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Selection affects genes involved in replication during long-term evolution in experimental populations of the bacteriophage φX174.

Brown Celeste J CJ Millstein Jack J Williams Christopher J CJ Wichman Holly A HA

PloS one 20130322 3

Observing organisms that evolve in response to strong selection over very short time scales allows the determination of the molecular mechanisms underlying adaptation. Although dissecting these molecular mechanisms is expensive and time-consuming, general patterns can be detected from repeated experiments, illuminating the biological processes involved in evolutionary adaptation. The bacteriophage φX174 was grown for 50 days in replicate chemostats under two culture conditions: Escherichia coli ...[more]

PMID: 23533679

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Project description:Gene regulation plays a central role in the adaptation of organisms to their environments. There are many molecular components to gene regulation, and it is often difficult to determine both the genetic basis of adaptation and the evolutionary forces that influence regulation. In multiple evolution experiments with the bacteriophage ?X174, adaptive substitutions in cis-acting regulatory sequences sweep through the phage population as the result of strong positive selection at high temperatures that are non-permissive for laboratory-adapted phage. For one cis-regulatory region, we investigate the individual effects of four adaptive substitutions on transcript levels and fitness for phage growing on three hosts at two temperatures.The effect of the four individual substitutions on transcript levels is to down-regulate gene expression, regardless of temperature or host. To ascertain the conditions under which these substitutions are adaptive, fitness was measured by a variety of methods for several bacterial hosts growing at two temperatures, the control temperature of 37°C and the selective temperature of 42°C. Time to lysis and doublings per hour indicate that the four substitutions individually improve fitness over the ancestral strain at high temperature independent of the bacterial host in which the fitness was measured. Competition assays between the ancestral strain and either of two mutant strains indicate that both mutants out-compete the ancestor at high temperature, but the relative frequencies of each phage remain the same at the control temperature.Our results strongly suggest that gene transcription plays an important role in influencing fitness in the bacteriophage ?X174, and different point mutations in a single cis-regulatory region provided the genetic basis for this role in adaptation to high temperature. We speculate that the adaptive nature of these substitutions is due to the physiology of the host at high temperature or the need to maintain particular ratios of phage proteins during capsid assembly. Our investigation of regulatory evolution contributes to interpreting genome-level assessments of regulatory variation, as well as to understanding the molecular basis of adaptation.

Project description:Like many viruses, bacteriophage phi X174 packages its DNA genome into a procapsid that is assembled from structural intermediates and scaffolding proteins. The procapsid contains the structural proteins F, G and H, as well as the scaffolding proteins B and D. Provirions are formed by packaging of DNA together with the small internal J proteins, while losing at least some of the B scaffolding proteins. Eventually, loss of the D scaffolding proteins and the remaining B proteins leads to the formation of mature virions.phi X174 108S 'procapsids' have been purified in milligram quantities by removing 114S (mature virion) and 70S (abortive capsid) particles from crude lysates by differential precipitation with polyethylene glycol. 132S 'provirions' were purified on sucrose gradients in the presence of EDTA. Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) was used to obtain reconstructions of procapsids and provirions. Although these are very similar to each other, their structures differ greatly from that of the virion. The F and G proteins, whose atomic structures in virions were previously determined from X-ray crystallography, were fitted into the cryo-EM reconstructions. This showed that the pentamer of G proteins on each five-fold vertex changes its conformation only slightly during DNA packaging and maturation, whereas major tertiary and quaternary structural changes occur in the F protein. The procapsids and provirions were found to contain 120 copies of the D protein arranged as tetramers on the two-fold axes. DNA might enter procapsids through one of the 30 A diameter holes on the icosahedral three-fold axes.Combining cryo-EM image reconstruction and X-ray crystallography has revealed the major conformational changes that can occur in viral assembly. The function of the scaffolding proteins may be, in part, to support weak interactions between the structural proteins in the procapsids and to cover surfaces that are subsequently required for subunit-subunit interaction in the virion. The structures presented here are, therefore, analogous to chaperone proteins complexed with folding intermediates of a substrate.