Long-term success will often require the ability to adapt to changing conditions. In biological populations the capacity to do this, termed evolvability, can play a crucial role in determining evolutionary winners and losers. Nevertheless, systematic study of evolvability is difficult. Its underlying mechanisms, how it can be selected, and how it influences evolutionary outcomes, remain poorly understood. This project will address these questions using lab-evolved and natural isolates of a model bacterium, Escherichia coli. The ability to follow population evolution in real time, and to compete a population's past (stored as a frozen, but revivable sample) against its future will be used to directly examine the effect and consequences of differences in evolvability. Sequencing of bacterial genomes will allow the genetic basis of observed differences to be determined.
Findings of experiments that are explicitly designed to examine evolvability will represent a significant basic contribution to the field of evolutionary biology, not least in contributing to a goal of being able to make general predictions about evolutionary responses. An understanding of the genetic and physiological basis of evolvability will be relevant to fields such as vaccine and antibiotic design (where evolvability is something to be countered) and biotechnology (where evolvability will often be something to be exploited). The project will make significant and novel contributions to training of undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers.
