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McDonald, Michael J.

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McDonald

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Michael J.

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McDonald, Michael J.
Author's Publications: search.filters.isAuthorOfPublication.ca04f8f1-a6d9-4486-b705-299128443e88

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    Crowded growth leads to the spontaneous evolution of semistable coexistence in laboratory yeast populations
    (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2015) Frenkel, Evgeni; McDonald, Michael J.; Van Dyken, J. David; Kosheleva, Katya; Lang, Gregory I.; Desai, Michael
    Identifying the mechanisms that create and maintain biodiversity is a central challenge in biology. Stable diversification of microbial populations often requires the evolution of differences in resource utilization. Alternatively, coexistence can be maintained by specialization to exploit spatial heterogeneity in the environment. Here, we report spontaneous diversification maintained by a related but distinct mechanism: crowding avoidance. During experimental evolution of laboratory Saccharomyces cerevisiae populations, we observed the repeated appearance of “adherent” (A) lineages able to grow as a dispersed film, in contrast to their crowded “bottom-dweller” (B) ancestors. These two types stably coexist because dispersal reduces interference competition for nutrients among kin, at the cost of a slower maximum growth rate. This tradeoff causes the frequencies of the two types to oscillate around equilibrium over the course of repeated cycles of growth, crowding, and dispersal. However, further coevolution of the A and B types can perturb and eventually destroy their coexistence over longer time scales. We introduce a simple mathematical model of this “semistable” coexistence, which explains the interplay between ecological and evolutionary dynamics. Because crowded growth generally limits nutrient access in biofilms, the mechanism we report here may be broadly important in maintaining diversity in these natural environments.
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    Sex Speeds Adaptation by Altering the Dynamics of Molecular Evolution
    (2016) McDonald, Michael J.; Rice, Daniel; Desai, Michael
    Sex and recombination are pervasive throughout nature despite their substantial costs1. Understanding the evolutionary forces that maintain these phenomena is a central challenge in biology2,3. One longstanding hypothesis argues that sex is beneficial because recombination speeds adaptation4. Theory has proposed a number of distinct population genetic mechanisms that could underlie this advantage. For example, sex can promote the fixation of beneficial mutations either by alleviating interference competition (the Fisher-Muller effect)5,6 or by separating them from deleterious load (the ruby in the rubbish effect)7,8. Previous experiments confirm that sex can increase the rate of adaptation9–17, but these studies did not observe the evolutionary dynamics that drive this effect at the genomic level. Here, we present the first comparison between the sequence-level dynamics of adaptation in experimental sexual and asexual populations, which allows us to identify the specific mechanisms by which sex speeds adaptation. We find that sex alters the molecular signatures of evolution by changing the spectrum of mutations that fix, and confirm theoretical predictions that it does so by alleviating clonal interference. We also show that substantially deleterious mutations hitchhike to fixation in adapting asexual populations. In contrast, recombination prevents such mutations from fixing. Our results demonstrate that sex both speeds adaptation and alters its molecular signature by allowing natural selection to more efficiently sort beneficial from deleterious mutations.