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Tuning environmental timescales to evolve and maintain generalists.

ABSTRACT: Natural environments can present diverse challenges, but some genotypes remain fit across many environments. Such "generalists" can be hard to evolve, outcompeted by specialists fitter in any particular environment. Here, inspired by the search for broadly neutralizing antibodies during B cell affinity maturation, we demonstrate that environmental changes on an intermediate timescale can reliably evolve generalists, even when faster or slower environmental changes are unable to do so. We find that changing environments on timescales comparable with evolutionary transients in a population enhance the rate of evolving generalists from specialists, without enhancing the reverse process. The yield of generalists is further increased in more complex dynamic environments, such as a "chirp" of increasing frequency. Our work offers design principles for how nonequilibrium fitness "seascapes" can dynamically funnel populations to genotypes unobtainable in static environments.

SUBMITTER: Sachdeva V

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7293598 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Tuning environmental timescales to evolve and maintain generalists.

Sachdeva Vedant V Husain Kabir K Sheng Jiming J Wang Shenshen S Murugan Arvind A

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20200526 23

Natural environments can present diverse challenges, but some genotypes remain fit across many environments. Such "generalists" can be hard to evolve, outcompeted by specialists fitter in any particular environment. Here, inspired by the search for broadly neutralizing antibodies during B cell affinity maturation, we demonstrate that environmental changes on an intermediate timescale can reliably evolve generalists, even when faster or slower environmental changes are unable to do so. We find th ...[more]

PMID: 32457160

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Project description:BackgroundOrganisms are expected to respond to changing environmental conditions through local adaptation, range shift or local extinction. The process of local adaptation can occur by genetic changes or phenotypic plasticity, and becomes especially relevant when dispersal abilities or possibilities are somehow constrained. For genetic changes to occur, mutations are the ultimate source of variation and the mutation rate in terms of a mutator locus can be subject to evolutionary change. Recent findings suggest that the evolution of the mutation rate in a sexual species can advance invasion speed and promote adaptation to novel environmental conditions. Following this idea, this work uses an individual-based model approach to investigate if the mutation rate can also evolve in a sexual species experiencing different conditions of directional climate change, under different scenarios of colored stochastic environmental noise, probability of recombination and of beneficial mutations. The color of the noise mimicked investigating the evolutionary dynamics of the mutation rate in different habitats.ResultsThe results suggest that the mutation rate in a sexual species experiencing directional climate change scenarios can evolve and reach relatively high values mainly under conditions of complete linkage of the mutator locus and the adaptation locus. In contrast, when they are unlinked, the mutation rate can slightly increase only under scenarios where at least 50% of arising mutations are beneficial and the rate of environmental change is relatively fast. This result is robust under different scenarios of stochastic environmental noise, which supports the observation of no systematic variation in the mutation rate among organisms experiencing different habitats.ConclusionsGiven that 50% beneficial mutations may be an unrealistic assumption, and that recombination is ubiquitous in sexual species, the evolution of an elevated mutation rate in a sexual species experiencing directional climate change might be rather unlikely. Furthermore, when the percentage of beneficial mutations and the population size are small, sexual species (especially multicellular ones) producing few offspring may be expected to react to changing environments not by adaptive genetic change, but mainly through plasticity. Without the ability for a plastic response, such species may become - at least locally - extinct.

Dataset Information

Tuning environmental timescales to evolve and maintain generalists.

Publications

Tuning environmental timescales to evolve and maintain generalists.

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