Speaker
Chikara Furusawa
Description
Biological systems change their state to evolve and adapt to changes in
environmental conditions. Despite the recognized importance of
characterizing the biological capacity to adapt and evolve, studies on
biological evolvability and plasticity have remained at a qualitative
level. To unveil how the course of evolution is constrained in high-
dimensional phenotype and genotype spaces, we performed laboratory
evolution under various (more than 100) stress environments, and
changes in phenotypes and genome sequence were analyzed [1,2]. The
results of these comprehensive analyses
demonstrated that the expression changes were restricted to low-
dimensional dynamics, while diverse genomic changes can contribute
to similar phenotypic changes. Furthermore, to analyze the nature of
evolutionary constraint, we performed computer simulations of
adaptive evolution using simple cell models. Again, we found that
cellular state changes in adaptation and evolution are generally
restricted to low-dimensional dynamics. In this simulated dynamics of
adaptive evolution, logarithmic changes in expression are shown to be
proportional across all genes, with the proportionality coefficient given
by the change in the growth rate of the cell, which was consistent with
the experimental data [3,4]. Based on these results, we will discuss the
nature of phenotypic plasticity and constraint in bacterial evolution, and
possible strategies to predict and control the evolutionary dynamics.
Primary author
Chikara Furusawa
