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The rhythm of microbial adaptation

Nature volume 413, pages 299–302 (2001)Cite this article

An Erratum to this article was published on 13 December 2001

Abstract

The evolutionary biologist “studies the steps by which the miraculous adaptations so characteristic of every aspect of the organic world have evolved”1. But the general nature of such adaptive steps is still unclear. Evolution is often thought to be random and dependent on unpredictable events2. In this light, one might expect the steps taken by adaptation to be completely random, both biologically and temporally. Here I present a mathematical derivation to show that, on the contrary, adaptive steps can have fairly strong rhythm. I find that the strength of the adaptive rhythm, that is its relative temporal regularity, is equal to a constant that is the same for all microbial populations. As a consequence, numbers of accumulated adaptations are predicted to have a universal variance/mean ratio. The theory derived here is potentially applicable to the study of molecular evolution.

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Figure 1: Variance/mean ratio for numbers of accumulated adaptations plotted against numbers of subsequent contending mutations, j.
Figure 2: Comparing theory with simulations and HIV data (see Methods).

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Acknowledgements

I thank C. Macken, T. Johnson, P. Sniegowski, A. Orr, D. Chencha, J. Gerrish, P. Baccam, R. Lenski and D. Krakauer for discussions. This work was supported in part by the Postdoctoral Fellowship program at Los Alamos National Laboratories and in part by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development program through financial support to C. Macken at Los Alamos National Laboratories.

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  1. Theoretical Biology and Biophysics, T-10, Mailstop K710, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, 87545, New Mexico, USA

    Philip Gerrish

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Correspondence to Philip Gerrish.

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Gerrish, P. The rhythm of microbial adaptation. Nature 413, 299–302 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/35095046

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