Selection on mutators is not frequency-dependent

Abstract
Data availability
Article and author information
Metrics

Abstract

The evolutionary fate of mutator mutations – genetic variants that raise the genome-wide mutation rate – in asexual populations is often described as being frequency (or number) dependent. Mutators can invade a population by hitchhiking with a sweeping beneficial mutation, but motivated by earlier experiments results, it has been repeatedly suggested that mutators must be sufficiently frequent to produce such a driver mutation before non-mutators do. Here, we use stochastic, agent-based simulations to show that neither the strength nor the sign of selection on mutators depend on their initial frequency, and while the overall probability of hitchhiking increases predictably with frequency, the per-capita probability of fixation remains unchanged.

Data availability

Simulation code and numerical data for the figures are available at https://github.com/yraynes/Mutator-Frequency.

Article and author information

Author details

Yevgeniy Raynes

Center for Computational Molecular Biology, Brown University, Providence, United States

For correspondence
yevgeniy_raynes@brown.edu

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-1608-9479
Daniel Weinreich

Center for Computational Molecular Biology, Brown University, Providence, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-1424-7541

Funding

National Science Foundation (DEB-1556300)

Yevgeniy Raynes
Daniel Weinreich

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.