1–26 Jul 2019
Nordita, Stockholm
Europe/Stockholm timezone

Analysis of Evolutionary Constraints and Plasticity by Microbial Laboratory Evolution and Computational Models

12 Jul 2019, 11:00
30m
FB52 (Nordita, Stockholm)

FB52

Nordita, Stockholm

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

Presentation materials

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