Big questions in Evolutionary Biology and experimental limitations
- The evolution of complex traits.
- The role of neutral variation in adaptive evolution.
- Selection for fitness vs selection for robustness.
- The topography of adaptive landscapes and the evolution of landscapes.
- Eco-evolutionary dynamics: how evolution changes ecology and how ecology modulates evolution.
- Evolution of phenotype-genotype maps.
- The evolution of genetic systems (sex, speciation, genome architecture).
The advantages of microbial Experimental Evolution
- They are easy to propagate and enumerate.
- They reproduce quickly, which allows experiments to run for many generations.
- They allow large populations in small spaces, which facilitates experimental replication.
-They can be stored in suspended animation and later revived, which allows the direct comparison of ancestral and evolved types.
-Many microbes reproduce asexually and the resulting clonality enhances the precision of experimental replication.
-Asexuality also maintains linkage between a genetic marker and the genomic background into which it is placed, which facilitates fitness measurements.
-It is easy to manipulate environmental variables, such as resources, as well as the genetic composition of founding populations.
- There are abundant molecular and genomic data for many species, as well as techniques for their precise genetic analysis and manipulation.
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