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RISKY STRATEGY. “In the long term, increased mutation rates are not without evolutionary risk. Opportunities for mutations that greatly improve fitness will eventually run out in the optimization regime. It may then be beneficial to compensate for a hypermutator defect and to become less evolvable in order to lower the genetic load.” https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg3564 View in LinkedIn

POSITIVE IMPACT. “However, the hypermutator subpopulation has increased evolvability because it has a much higher per-capita chance of producing the next highly beneficial mutation, or multiple beneficial mutations, than a non-mutator competitor (Fig. 3a). Thus, despite their slight fitness costs, hypermutators can sometimes hitchhike to fixation with the beneficial mutations that they generate.” https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg3564 View in LinkedIn

FREQUENCY. “Given the balance between their high rate of occurrence and small fitness costs, hypermutators might exist at frequencies of 10(-6) -10(-4) in experimental populations of E. coli.” https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg3564 View in LinkedIn

KNOWN UNKNOWNS. “We do not know what time is. Matter is not alien to space; material elementary particles (non-zero rest energy) are longitudinal wavepackets of contracted, or dilated, space, which are the bivalent elementary electric charges. Space must be an elastic fluid.” (Shlomo Barak). https://lnkd.in/dsc-CDEc View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this second and last weekend on the subject of mutations in evolution. It is clear that this topic is central to cancer development and understanding how populations of cells evolve in culture has led to the beginning of new approaches to thinking about cancer treatment. https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg3564 View in LinkedIn

WIDER APPLICABILITY. “Future studies might also reveal the extent to which ecological interactions and differences in evolvability in these genetically diverse cell populations affect disease outcomes.” https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg3564 View in LinkedIn

TREATMENT STRATEGIES. “These types of studies will undoubtedly lead to important advances in identifying specific genes and mutations that contribute to disease and resistance to treatment.” https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg3564 View in LinkedIn

APPLICATIONS TO ONCOLOGY. “Elucidating genome dynamics has similarly proved to be crucial for understanding many observations regarding the progression of neoplastic tumours.” https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg3564 View in LinkedIn

CO-EVOLVING CELLS. “The complex interplay between ecological interactions and genetic contingency determined the evolutionary outcomes in these co-evolving populations.” https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg3564 View in LinkedIn

NUTRIENT STARVATION. “Complex ecologies also evolve in closed cultures in which the nutrients are exhausted and are not renewed. In these cultures, the viable cell population declines over time, as starvation takes its toll. However, not all genotypes die at the same rate, and the survivors are enriched for growth advantage in stationary phase (GASP) mutants, that exploit by-products of dead and dying cells.” https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg3564 View in LinkedIn