Neutral diversity in experimental metapopulations

Guilhem Doulcier and Amaury Lambert

Theoretical Population Biology, 2024, vol. 158, issue C, 89-108

Abstract: New automated and high-throughput methods allow the manipulation and selection of numerous bacterial populations. In this manuscript we are interested in the neutral diversity patterns that emerge from such a setup in which many bacterial populations are grown in parallel serial transfers, in some cases with population-wide extinction and splitting events. We model bacterial growth by a birth–death process and use the theory of coalescent point processes. We show that there is a dilution factor that optimises the expected amount of neutral diversity for a given number of cycles, and study the power law behaviour of the mutation frequency spectrum for different experimental regimes. We also explore how neutral variation diverges between two recently split populations by establishing a new formula for the expected number of shared and private mutations. Finally, we show the interest of such a setup to select a phenotype of interest that requires multiple mutations.

Keywords: Neutral diversity; Population genetics; Experimental evolution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040580924000200
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:thpobi:v:158:y:2024:i:c:p:89-108

DOI: 10.1016/j.tpb.2024.02.011

Access Statistics for this article

Theoretical Population Biology is currently edited by Jeremy Van Cleve

More articles in Theoretical Population Biology from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().