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MBE Advance Access published online on March 22, 2007
Molecular Biology and Evolution, doi:10.1093/molbev/msm056
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Research Article

Clonal Interference is Alleviated By High Mutation Rates in Large Populations

Jonathan P. Bollback1 and John P. Huelsenbeck2

1 Institute of Biology, University of Copenhagen, Universitetsparken 15, Building 10, DK-2100 Copenhagen Ø, Denmark
2 Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA

Corresponding author: Jonathan P. Bollback, Institute of Biology – Evolutionary Biology, Universitetsparken 15, Building 10, University of Copenhagen, DK-2100, Copenhagen Ø, Denmark, Email: bollback{at}binf.ku.dk, Tel: +45 35 321 338, Fax: +45 35 321 281

Received for publication January 26, 2007. Accepted for publication March 16, 2007.

When a beneficial mutation is fixed in a population that lacks recombination, the genetic background linked to that mutation is fixed. As a result, beneficial mutations on different backgrounds experience competition, or "clonal interference", that can cause asexual populations to evolve more slowly than their sexual counterparts. Factors such as a large population size (N) and high mutation rates (µ) increase the number of competing beneficial mutations, and hence are expected to increase the intensity of clonal interference. However, recent theory suggests that, with very large values of Nµ, the severity of clonal interference may instead decline. The reason is that, with large Nµ, genomes including both beneficial mutations are rapidly created by recurrent mutation, obviating the need for recombination. Here, we analyze data from experimentally evolved asexual populations of a bacteriophage and find that, in these non-recombining populations with very large Nµ, recurrent mutation does appear to ameliorate this cost of asexuality.

Key Words: Adaptation • Experimental evolution • Clonal Interference • Mutation


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