Experimental evolution articles from across Nature Portfolio

After 600 rounds of selection, anaerobic snowflake yeast evolved to be macroscopic, becoming around 20,000 times larger (approximately mm scale) and about 10,000-fold more biophysically tough, while retaining a clonal multicellular life cycle.

In microbial community assembly, species that establish earlier often have an advantage. Here, the authors explore these priority effects in the tomato plant-associated microbiome, showing that experimental evolution selecting for host colonization alters priority effects among competitors.

Phage-plasmids are bacterial extrachromosomal elements that act both as plasmids and as viruses. Here, Shan et al. show that segregational drift and loss-of-function mutations play key roles in the infection dynamics of a cosmopolitan phage-plasmid, allowing it to create continuous productive infections in marine bacteria.

G protein-coupled receptors are a major class of drug targets. Here, the authors develop a method whereby their biophysical and functional properties can be altered through directed evolution in mammalian cells, leading to variants exhibiting features such as high stability and expression, or increased allosteric coupling.