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Adaptive Diversification in Genes That Regulate Resource Use in Escherichia coli
While there has been much recent focus on the ecological causes of adaptive diversification, we know less about the genetic nature of the trade-offs in resource use that create and maintain stable, diversified ecotypes. Here we show how a regulatory genetic change can contribute to sympatric diversi...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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Public Library of Science
2007
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Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1779306/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17238290 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.0030015 |
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author | Spencer, Christine C Bertrand, Melanie Travisano, Michael Doebeli, Michael |
author_facet | Spencer, Christine C Bertrand, Melanie Travisano, Michael Doebeli, Michael |
author_sort | Spencer, Christine C |
collection | PubMed |
description | While there has been much recent focus on the ecological causes of adaptive diversification, we know less about the genetic nature of the trade-offs in resource use that create and maintain stable, diversified ecotypes. Here we show how a regulatory genetic change can contribute to sympatric diversification caused by differential resource use and maintained by negative frequency-dependent selection in Escherichia coli. During adaptation to sequential use of glucose and acetate, these bacteria differentiate into two ecotypes that differ in their growth profiles. The “slow-switcher” exhibits a long lag when switching to growth on acetate after depletion of glucose, whereas the “fast-switcher” exhibits a short switching lag. We show that the short switching time in the fast-switcher is associated with a failure to down-regulate potentially costly acetate metabolism during growth on glucose. While growing on glucose, the fast-switcher expresses malate synthase A (aceB), a critical gene for acetate metabolism that fails to be properly down-regulated because of a transposon insertion in one of its regulators. Swapping the mutant regulatory allele with the ancestral allele indicated that the transposon is in part responsible for the observed differentiation between ecological types. Our results provide a rare example of a mechanistic integration of diversifying processes at the genetic, physiological, and ecological levels. |
format | Text |
id | pubmed-1779306 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2007 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-17793062007-01-20 Adaptive Diversification in Genes That Regulate Resource Use in Escherichia coli Spencer, Christine C Bertrand, Melanie Travisano, Michael Doebeli, Michael PLoS Genet Research Article While there has been much recent focus on the ecological causes of adaptive diversification, we know less about the genetic nature of the trade-offs in resource use that create and maintain stable, diversified ecotypes. Here we show how a regulatory genetic change can contribute to sympatric diversification caused by differential resource use and maintained by negative frequency-dependent selection in Escherichia coli. During adaptation to sequential use of glucose and acetate, these bacteria differentiate into two ecotypes that differ in their growth profiles. The “slow-switcher” exhibits a long lag when switching to growth on acetate after depletion of glucose, whereas the “fast-switcher” exhibits a short switching lag. We show that the short switching time in the fast-switcher is associated with a failure to down-regulate potentially costly acetate metabolism during growth on glucose. While growing on glucose, the fast-switcher expresses malate synthase A (aceB), a critical gene for acetate metabolism that fails to be properly down-regulated because of a transposon insertion in one of its regulators. Swapping the mutant regulatory allele with the ancestral allele indicated that the transposon is in part responsible for the observed differentiation between ecological types. Our results provide a rare example of a mechanistic integration of diversifying processes at the genetic, physiological, and ecological levels. Public Library of Science 2007-01 2007-01-19 /pmc/articles/PMC1779306/ /pubmed/17238290 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.0030015 Text en © 2007 Spencer et al. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Spencer, Christine C Bertrand, Melanie Travisano, Michael Doebeli, Michael Adaptive Diversification in Genes That Regulate Resource Use in Escherichia coli |
title | Adaptive Diversification in Genes That Regulate Resource Use in Escherichia coli
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title_full | Adaptive Diversification in Genes That Regulate Resource Use in Escherichia coli
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title_fullStr | Adaptive Diversification in Genes That Regulate Resource Use in Escherichia coli
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title_full_unstemmed | Adaptive Diversification in Genes That Regulate Resource Use in Escherichia coli
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title_short | Adaptive Diversification in Genes That Regulate Resource Use in Escherichia coli
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title_sort | adaptive diversification in genes that regulate resource use in escherichia coli |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1779306/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17238290 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.0030015 |
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