Journal ArticleDOI
Fitness of RNA virus decreased by Muller's ratchet.
TLDR
Results show that deleterious mutations are generated at a sufficiently high rate to advance Muller's ratchet in an RNA virus and that beneficial, backward and compensatory mutations cannot stop theRatchet in the observed range of fitness decrease.Abstract:
WHY sex exists remains an unsolved problem in biology1–3. If mutations are on the average deleterious, a high mutation rate can account for the evolution of sex4. One form of this mutational hypothesis is Muller's ratchet5,6. If the mutation rate is high, mutation-free individuals become rare and they can be lost by genetic drift in small populations. In asexual populations, as Muller5 noted, the loss is irreversible and the load of deleterious mutations increases in a ratchet-like manner with the successive loss of the least-mutated individuals. Sex can be advantageous because it increases the fitness of sexual populations by re-creating mutation-free individuals from mutated individuals and stops (or slows) Muller's ratchet. Although Muller's ratchet is an appealing hypothesis, it has been investigated and documented experimentally in only one group of organisms—ciliated protozoa2. I initiated a study to examine the role of Muller's ratchet on the evolution of sex in RNA viruses and report here a significant decrease in fitness due to Muller's ratchet in 20 lineages of the RNA bacteriophage Φ6. These results show that deleterious mutations are generated at a sufficiently high rate to advance Muller's ratchet in an RNA virus and that beneficial, backward and compensatory mutations cannot stop the ratchet in the observed range of fitness decrease.read more
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Journal ArticleDOI
RNA virus mutations and fitness for survival
Esteban Domingo,John J. Holland +1 more
TL;DR: E Epidemiological as well as functional and structural studies suggest that RNA viruses can tolerate restricted types and numbers of mutations during any specific time point during their evolution, which may open new avenues for combating viral infections.
Journal ArticleDOI
Evolution experiments with microorganisms: the dynamics and genetic bases of adaptation.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined the dynamics of evolutionary adaptation, the genetic bases of adaptation, tradeoffs and the environmental specificity of adaptation and the origin and evolutionary consequences of mutators.
Journal ArticleDOI
Are Rare Variants Responsible for Susceptibility to Complex Diseases
TL;DR: An explicit model for the evolution of complex disease loci is proposed, incorporating mutation, random genetic drift, and the possibility of purifying selection against susceptibility mutations, showing that, for the most plausible range of mutation rates, neutral susceptibility alleles are unlikely to be at intermediate frequencies and contribute little to the overall genetic variance for the disease.
Journal ArticleDOI
Viral Quasispecies Evolution
TL;DR: The understanding of viruses as quasispecies has led to new antiviral designs, such as lethal mutagenesis, whose aim is to drive viruses toward low fitness values with limited chances of fitness recovery.
References
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Book
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TL;DR: Molecular Cloning has served as the foundation of technical expertise in labs worldwide for 30 years as mentioned in this paper and has been so popular, or so influential, that no other manual has been more widely used and influential.
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The Evolution of Sex
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors compared the short-term advantages of sex and recombination in a finite population with the long-term consequences of recombination and sex and showed that recombination has shortterm advantages for both sexes.
Journal ArticleDOI
Evolution of sex
TL;DR: The Economy of Nature and the Evolution of Sex*.
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The evolutionary advantage of recombination
TL;DR: Computer simulations of substitution of favorable mutants and of the long-term increase of deleterious mutants verified the essential correctness of the original Fisher-Muller argument and the reality of the Muller ratchet mechanism.