Organisms have to deal with many kinds of costs, but dissecting and quantifying each of them, and how they affect adaptation and evolution, is tricky. This is especially true when some costs are “internal” (e.g., due to deleterious mutations) and some are “external” (environmental). In a study led by former postdoc Laasya Samhita (now Assistant Professor at Ashoka University), we tackled this problem by genetically altering the cost of mistranslation in E. coli populations, and then adding an antibiotic cost on top. We find that the antibiotic cost was much larger than the cost of changing translation accuracy, and unsurprisingly, the antibiotic cost was compensated quickly during laboratory evolution. But some surprises emerged: the cost of altered mistranslation was also reduced in many cases, despite no clear relevant mutations; and different strains used different genetic routes to adaptation. Find out more juicy details in the paper, check out the article by Haoran Cai highlighting our study, and enjoy this graphic by Nishant Asawadekar!
AdaptationLab 