Bacterial genomes experience lots of mutations that result from a complex mix of DNA damage, errors made by DNA polymerase, and errors repaired or made by repair enzymes. Do these processes leave a tell-tale signature in the genome, and can we use it to infer which processes were most important? A new paper in Genome... Continue Reading →
In 2022, Deepa organized the ASN Vice-Presidential Symposium at the annual meeting of the Evolution societies in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. The symposium featured a set of wonderful talks by five invited speakers from across the world, analysing how genetic variation shapes adaptation. The work reported in these talks is now out in the Symposium section... Continue Reading →
Several years ago, Arun Prakash and Imroze Khan set up an ambitious experimental evolution study in the lab, infecting populations of flour beetles with the pathogen Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). They found that different selection regimes led to the evolution of mutually exclusive immune responses – beetles either evolved better basal resistance to Bt, or immune priming... Continue Reading →
Our paper describing the evolutionary effects of shifts in mutation bias is now published! We started out by asking if mutation spectrum could alter the fitness effects of new mutations in E. coli. To our surprise, we found a consistent effect across many environments, but could not attribute the difference to any particular properties of... Continue Reading →
Our long-dreamt-of project on understanding the effects of widely varying tRNA gene copy number is finally complete! In a new paper, we describe the growth consequences of altering redundancy in the bacterial translation machinery. We find that the costs and benefits of redundancy vary with the possible growth rate, i.e. it is nutrient-driven. This was... Continue Reading →
We are starting 2023 on a great footing, with a new paper reporting a lot of really nice work by Vrinda and Gaurav. For a long time we have been puzzled by seemingly maladaptive oviposition behaviours of female flour beetles faced with different resource options. By carefully manipulating egg allocation across resource patches, we were... Continue Reading →
In late 2019, a bunch of people gathered at the Lorentz Center in The Netherlands to think about how we can predict evolution, and what we need to do better. It was a fantastic meeting, and we just published one of the outcomes – a review discussing different kinds of evolutionary predictions, factors that increase predictability,... Continue Reading →
Synonymous variation was long thought to be neutral (invisible to selection), but in the 50 years since we first began understanding the genetic code, this view has undergone a dramatic shift. A new book on the impact of synonymous mutations (Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms: Human variation and a coming revolution in biology and medicine) includes our... Continue Reading →
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