Abstract
Because most newly arising mutations are neutral or deleterious, it has been argued1,2,3 that the mutation rate has evolved to be as low as possible, limited only by the cost of error-avoidance and error-correction mechanisms. But up to one per cent of natural bacterial isolates are ‘mutator’ clones that have high mutation rates4,5,6. We consider here whether high mutation rates might playan important role in adaptive evolution. Models of large, asexual, clonal populations adapting to a new environment show that strong mutator genes (such as those that increase mutation rates by 1,000-fold) can accelerate adaptation, even if the mutator gene remains at a very low frequency (for example, 10−5). Less potent mutators (10 to 100-fold increase) can become fixed in a fraction of finite populations. The parameters of the model have been set to values typical for Escherichia coli cultures, which behave in a manner similar to the model in long-term adaptation experiments7.
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Acknowledgements
Most of the simulations used the SP2 computer, at the Centre de Ressources Informatiques de l'Université de Paris-Sud (Orsay). We are grateful to M.-P. Donsimoni for providing us with a favourable environment and to J. Shykoff and N. Smith for eliminating deleterious style and generating favourable comments. This work has been funded by ‘Bureau des Ressources Génétiques, Ministère de l'Environnement, Association de la Recherche contre le Cancer, Actions Concertées Coordonnées-Sciences du Vivant du Ministère de l'Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche and Groupement de Recherche et d'Etudes sur les Génomes’.
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Taddei, F., Radman, M., Maynard-Smith, J. et al. Role of mutator alleles in adaptive evolution. Nature 387, 700–702 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1038/42696
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/42696
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