Mutations: When benefits level off
Wednesday, June 8, 2011 - 08:00
in Biology & Nature
Beneficial mutations within a bacterial population accumulate during evolution, but performance tends to reach a plateau. Consequently, theoretical evolutionary models need to take into account a "braking effect" in expected benefits on the survival and the reproduction of organisms. This phenomenon (known as negative epistasis) has, for the first time, been demonstrated experimentally by a French-American collaboration, including a team from CNRS. The results are published in Science on 3 June 2011.