Selection and the direction of phenotypic evolution
- Ecole Normale Superieure, France
Abstract
Predicting adaptive phenotypic evolution depends on invariable selection gradients and on the stability of the genetic covariances between the component traits of the multivariate phenotype. We describe the evolution of six traits of locomotion behavior and body size in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans for 50 generations of adaptation to a novel environment. We show that the direction of adaptive multivariate phenotypic evolution can be predicted from the ancestral selection differentials, particularly when the traits were measured in the new environment. Interestingly, the evolution of individual traits does not always occur in the direction of selection, nor are trait responses to selection always homogeneous among replicate populations. These observations are explained because the phenotypic dimension with most of the ancestral standing genetic variation only partially aligns with the phenotypic dimension under directional selection. These findings validate selection theory and suggest that the direction of multivariate adaptive phenotypic evolution is predictable for tens of generations.
Data availability
New data, R code for analysis and modeling results is freely accessible and can be found at https://github.com/ExpEvolWormLab/Mallard_Robertson
-
Data from:Partial Selfing Can Reduce Genetic Loads While Maintaining Diversity During Experimental Evolutionfigshare, 10.6084/m9.figshare.8665661.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
European Research Council (ERC-St-243285)
- Henrique Teotónio
Agence Nationale pour la Recherche (ANR-14-ACHN-0032-01)
- Henrique Teotónio
Agence Nationale pour la Recherche (ANR-17-CE02-0017-01)
- Henrique Teotónio
National Science Foundation (PHY-1748958)
- Henrique Teotónio
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (2919.02)
- Henrique Teotónio
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2023, Mallard et al.
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.
Metrics
-
- 1,309
- views
-
- 254
- downloads
-
- 6
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Selection and the direction of phenotypic evolution
eLife 12:e80993.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.80993
Further reading
-
- Evolutionary Biology
Studying the fecal microbiota of wild baboons helps provide new insight into the factors that influence biological aging.
-
- Cancer Biology
- Evolutionary Biology
In growing cell populations such as tumours, mutations can serve as markers that allow tracking the past evolution from current samples. The genomic analyses of bulk samples and samples from multiple regions have shed light on the evolutionary forces acting on tumours. However, little is known empirically on the spatio-temporal dynamics of tumour evolution. Here, we leverage published data from resected hepatocellular carcinomas, each with several hundred samples taken in two and three dimensions. Using spatial metrics of evolution, we find that tumour cells grow predominantly uniformly within the tumour volume instead of at the surface. We determine how mutations and cells are dispersed throughout the tumour and how cell death contributes to the overall tumour growth. Our methods shed light on the early evolution of tumours in vivo and can be applied to high-resolution data in the emerging field of spatial biology.
