Abstract
Natural evolution involves genetic diversity such as environmental change and a selection between small populations. Adaptive laboratory evolution (ALE) refers to the experimental situation in which evolution is observed using living organisms under controlled conditions and stressors; organisms are thereby artificially forced to make evolutionary changes. Microorganisms are subject to a variety of stressors in the environment and are capable of regulating certain stress-inducible proteins to increase their chances of survival. Naturally occurring spontaneous mutations bring about changes in a microorganism's genome that affect its chances of survival. Long-term exposure to chemostat culture provokes an accumulation of spontaneous mutations and renders the most adaptable strain dominant. Compared to the colony transfer and serial transfer methods, chemostat culture entails the highest number of cell divisions and, therefore, the highest number of diverse populations. Although chemostat culture for ALE requires more complicated culture devices, it is less labor intensive once the operation begins. Comparative genomic and transcriptome analyses of the adapted strain provide evolutionary clues as to how the stressors contribute to mutations that overcome the stress. The goal of the current paper is to bring about accelerated evolution of microorganisms under controlled laboratory conditions.
Original language | English |
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Article number | e54446 |
Journal | Journal of Visualized Experiments |
Volume | 2016 |
Issue number | 115 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 20 Sep 2016 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This study was financially supported by the Korean Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning (Intelligent Synthetic Biology Center program 2012M3A6A8054887). P. Kim was supported by a fellowship from the Catholic University of Korea (2015).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Journal of Visualized Experiments.
Keywords
- Adaptation
- Chemostat
- Continuous selection
- Evolution
- Genetics
- Issue 115
- Microbiology
- Microorganism
- Stress
- Stress response