Thursday, February 20th, 2014
PhD student, Jungeui Hong and David Gresham have published a high resolution study of adaptive evolution of budding yeast in nutrient-limited environments. Using next generation sequencing of lineages and entire populations evolving in nitrogen-limited chemostats Hong and Gresham discovered that copy number variants containing nutrient transporter genes play a dominant role in the evolutionary dynamics. They found that within lineages adaptive mutations accumulate in functionally related loci resulting in gene network polymorphisms that are recurrently generated within individual populations. The work was published in the open access journal, PLoS Genetics..
