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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 16: Poster - Glasses / Stat. Phys. Bio. / Networks (joint DY/BP/CPP/SOE)
BP 16.21: Poster
Tuesday, April 1, 2014, 09:30–12:30, P1
Application of a random fitness landscape model to a long term evolution experiment — •Mares Barekzai1, Su-Chan Park2, and Joachim Krug3 — 1Department of Physics, University of Cologne,Germany — 2Department of Physics, Catholic University of Korea, Bucheon, South Korea — 3Department of Physics, University of Cologne,Germany
Since 1988, a long term microbial evolution experiment has attracted attention in the scientific community. In the experiment 12 populations of Escherichia coli are propagated in a daily refreshed minimal medium for more than 50000 generations. One of many results are the fitness trajectories of these asexually evolving populations, where fitness is measured as relative growth rate compared to the founding population. Is there a simple model to interpret the observed microbial evolution? We approached this question using the House of Cards Model introduced in 1978 by Kingman, which models the evolution of an asexual population on an uncorrelated random fitness landscape in the limit of infinite genome size. This limit implies that all mutations generate new fitness values drawn from a fixed probability distribution. The model produces fitness trajectories that are in qualitative agreement with the experimental data. Based on an analytical solution for the long term behavior of the model, we estimate the model parameters from the experimental data and provide a biological interpretation of our results.