Contingency and determinism in evolution: Replaying life's tape

ZD Blount, RE Lenski, JB Losos - Science, 2018 - science.org
BACKGROUND Evolution is a strongly historical process, and evolutionary biology is a field
that combines history and science. How the historical nature of evolution affects the …

Experimental evolution and the dynamics of adaptation and genome evolution in microbial populations

RE Lenski - The ISME journal, 2017 - academic.oup.com
Evolution is an on-going process, and it can be studied experimentally in organisms with
rapid generations. My team has maintained 12 populations of Escherichia coli in a simple …

The dynamics of molecular evolution over 60,000 generations

BH Good, MJ McDonald, JE Barrick, RE Lenski… - Nature, 2017 - nature.com
The outcomes of evolution are determined by a stochastic dynamical process that governs
how mutations arise and spread through a population. However, it is difficult to observe …

[HTML][HTML] Sugar synthesis from CO2 in Escherichia coli

N Antonovsky, S Gleizer, E Noor, Y Zohar, E Herz… - Cell, 2016 - cell.com
Can a heterotrophic organism be evolved to synthesize biomass from CO 2 directly? So far,
non-native carbon fixation in which biomass precursors are synthesized solely from CO 2 …

Revisiting the Design of the Long-Term Evolution Experiment with Escherichia coli

RE Lenski - Journal of Molecular Evolution, 2023 - Springer
The long-term evolution experiment (LTEE) with Escherichia coli began in 1988 and it
continues to this day, with its 12 populations having recently reached 75,000 generations of …

A conformational switch in the SCF-D3/MAX2 ubiquitin ligase facilitates strigolactone signalling

L Tal, M Palayam, M Ron, A Young, A Britt, N Shabek - Nature Plants, 2022 - nature.com
Strigolactones (SLs) are a class of plant hormones that regulate numerous processes of
growth and development. SL perception and signal activation involves interaction between F …

[HTML][HTML] Contingency and chance erase necessity in the experimental evolution of ancestral proteins

VC Xie, J Pu, BPH Metzger, JW Thornton… - Elife, 2021 - elifesciences.org
The roles of chance, contingency, and necessity in evolution are unresolved because they
have never been assessed in a single system or on timescales relevant to historical …

Recent insights into the world of dual‐function bacterial sRNAs

SB Schnoor, P Neubauer… - Wiley Interdisciplinary …, 2024 - Wiley Online Library
Dual‐function sRNAs refer to a small subgroup of small regulatory RNAs that merges base‐
pairing properties of antisense RNAs with peptide‐encoding properties of mRNA. Both …

[HTML][HTML] Historical contingency in the evolution of antibiotic resistance after decades of relaxed selection

KJ Card, T LaBar, JB Gomez, RE Lenski - PLoS biology, 2019 - journals.plos.org
Populations often encounter changed environments that remove selection for the
maintenance of particular phenotypic traits. The resulting genetic decay of those traits under …

On the deformability of an empirical fitness landscape by microbial evolution

D Bajić, JCC Vila, ZD Blount… - Proceedings of the …, 2018 - National Acad Sciences
A fitness landscape is a map between the genotype and its reproductive success in a given
environment. The topography of fitness landscapes largely governs adaptive dynamics …