Evolutionary adaptation after crippling cell polarization follows reproducible trajectories

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Abstract

Cells are organized by functional modules, which typically contain components whose removal severely compromises the module's function. Despite their importance, these components are not absolutely conserved between parts of the tree of life, suggesting that cells can evolve to perform the same biological functions with different proteins. We evolved Saccharomyces cerevisiae for 1000 generations without the important polarity gene BEM1. At the end of the evolution the bem1∆ lineages rapidly increase in fitness and then slowly reach >90% of the fitness of their BEM1 ancestors. Sequencing their genomes and monitoring polarization reveals a common evolutionary trajectory, with a fixed sequence of adaptive mutations, each improving cell polarization by inactivating proteins. Our results show that organisms can be evolutionarily robust to physiologically destructive perturbations and suggest that recovery by gene inactivation can lead to rapid divergence in the parts list for cell biologically important functions.

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Liedewij Laan

Bionanoscience Department, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands

For correspondence
l.laan@tudelft.nl

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
John H Koschwanez

FAS Center for Systems Biology, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Andrew W Murray

FAS Center for Systems Biology, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

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