SIGN EPISTASIS LIMITS EVOLUTIONARY TRADE-OFFS AT THE CONFLUENCE OF SINGLE- AND MULTI-CARBON METABOLISM INMETHYLOBACTERIUM EXTORQUENSAM1

Ecology and evolution of metabolic cross-feeding interactions in bacteria

Literature covered: early 2000s to late 2017Bacteria frequently exchange metabolites with other micro- and macro-organisms. In these often obligate cross-feeding interactions, primary metabolites such as vitamins, amino acids, nucleotides, or growth factors are exchanged. The widespread distribution of this type of metabolic interactions, however, is at odds with evolutionary theory: why should an organism invest costly resources to benefit other individuals rather than using these metabolites to maximize its own fitness? Recent empirical work has shown that bacterial genotypes can significantly benefit from trading metabolites with other bacteria relative to cells not engaging in such interactions. Here, we will provide a comprehensive overview over the ecological factors and evolutionary mechanisms that have been identified to explain the evolution and maintenance of metabolic mutualisms among microorganisms. Furthermore, we will highlight general principles that underlie the adaptive evolution of interconnected microbial metabolic networks as well as the evolutionary consequences that result for cells living in such communities.

A Low-Molecular-Weight Alginate Oligosaccharide Disrupts Pseudomonal Microcolony Formation and Enhances Antibiotic Effectiveness

In chronic respiratory disease, the formation of dense, 3-dimensional "microcolonies" by Pseudomonas aeruginosa within the airway plays an important role in contributing to resistance to treatment. An in vitro biofilm model of pseudomonal microcolony formation using artificial-sputum (AS) medium was established to study the effects of low-molecular-weight alginate oligomers (OligoG CF-5/20) on pseudomonal growth, microcolony formation, and the efficacy of colistin. The studies employed clinical cystic fibrosis (CF) isolates (n = 3) and reference nonmucoid and mucoid multidrug-resistant (MDR) CF isolates (n = 7). Bacterial growth and biofilm development and disruption were studied using cell viability assays and image analysis with scanning electron and confocal laser scanning microscopy. Pseudomonal growth in AS medium was associated with increased ATP production (P < 0.05) and the formation (at 48 h) of discrete (>10-μm) microcolonies. In conventional growth medium, colistin retained an ability to inhibit growth of planktonic bacteria, although the MIC was increased (0.1 to 0.4 μg/ml) in AS medium compared to Mueller-Hinton (MH) medium. In contrast, in an established-biofilm model in AS medium, the efficacy of colistin was decreased. OligoG CF-5/20 (≥2%) treatment, however, induced dose-dependent biofilm disruption (P < 0.05) and led to colistin retaining its antimicrobial activity (P < 0.05). While circular dichroism indicated that OligoG CF-5/20 did not change the orientation of the alginate carboxyl groups, mass spectrometry demonstrated that the oligomers induced dose-dependent (>0.2%; P < 0.05) reductions in pseudomonal quorum-sensing signaling. These findings reinforce the potential clinical significance of microcolony formation in the CF lung and highlight a novel approach to treat MDR pseudomonal infections.

A Mutational Hotspot and Strong Selection Contribute to the Order of Mutations Selected for during Escherichia coli Adaptation to the Gut

The relative role of drift versus selection underlying the evolution of bacterial species within the gut microbiota remains poorly understood. The large sizes of bacterial populations in this environment suggest that even adaptive mutations with weak effects, thought to be the most frequently occurring, could substantially contribute to a rapid pace of evolutionary change in the gut. We followed the emergence of intra-species diversity in a commensal Escherichia coli strain that previously acquired an adaptive mutation with strong effect during one week of colonization of the mouse gut. Following this first step, which consisted of inactivating a metabolic operon, one third of the subsequent adaptive mutations were found to have a selective effect as high as the first. Nevertheless, the order of the adaptive steps was strongly affected by a mutational hotspot with an exceptionally high mutation rate of 10-5. The pattern of polymorphism emerging in the populations evolving within different hosts was characterized by periodic selection, which reduced diversity, but also frequency-dependent selection, actively maintaining genetic diversity. Furthermore, the continuous emergence of similar phenotypes due to distinct mutations, known as clonal interference, was pervasive. Evolutionary change within the gut is therefore highly repeatable within and across hosts, with adaptive mutations of selection coefficients as strong as 12% accumulating without strong constraints on genetic background. In vivo competitive assays showed that one of the second steps (focA) exhibited positive epistasis with the first, while another (dcuB) exhibited negative epistasis. The data shows that strong effect adaptive mutations continuously recur in gut commensal bacterial species.

Environmental variation alters the fitness effects of rifampicin resistance mutations in Pseudomonas aeruginosa

The fitness effects of antibiotic resistance mutations in antibiotic-free conditions play a key role in determining the long-term maintenance of resistance. Although resistance is usually associated with a cost, the impact of environmental variation on the cost of resistance is poorly understood. Here, we test the impact of heterogeneity in temperature and resource availability on the fitness effects of antibiotic resistance using strains of the pathogenic bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa carrying clinically important rifampicin resistance mutations. Although the rank order of fitness was generally maintained across environments, fitness effects relative to the wild type differed significantly. Changes in temperature had a profound impact on the fitness effects of resistance, whereas changes in carbon substrate had only a weak impact. This suggests that environmental heterogeneity may influence whether the costs of resistance are likely to be ameliorated by second-site compensatory mutations or by reversion to wild-type rpoB. Our results highlight the need to consider environmental heterogeneity and genotype-by-environment interactions for fitness in models of resistance evolution.

Genomic investigations of evolutionary dynamics and epistasis in microbial evolution experiments

Microbial evolution experiments enable us to watch adaptation in real time, and to quantify the repeatability and predictability of evolution by comparing identical replicate populations. Further, we can resurrect ancestral types to examine changes over evolutionary time. Until recently, experimental evolution has been limited to measuring phenotypic changes, or to tracking a few genetic markers over time. However, recent advances in sequencing technology now make it possible to extensively sequence clones or whole-population samples from microbial evolution experiments. Here, we review recent work exploiting these techniques to understand the genomic basis of evolutionary change in experimental systems. We first focus on studies that analyze the dynamics of genome evolution in microbial systems. We then survey work that uses observations of sequence evolution to infer aspects of the underlying fitness landscape, concentrating on the epistatic interactions between mutations and the constraints these interactions impose on adaptation.

Genetic and phenotypic comparison of facultative methylotrophy between Methylobacterium extorquens strains PA1 and AM1

Methylobacterium extorquens AM1, a strain serendipitously isolated half a century ago, has become the best-characterized model system for the study of aerobic methylotrophy (the ability to grow on reduced single-carbon compounds). However, with 5 replicons and 174 insertion sequence (IS) elements in the genome as well as a long history of domestication in the laboratory, genetic and genomic analysis of M. extorquens AM1 face several challenges. On the contrary, a recently isolated strain - M. extorquens PA1- is closely related to M. extorquens AM1 (100% 16S rRNA identity) and contains a streamlined genome with a single replicon and only 20 IS elements. With the exception of the methylamine dehydrogenase encoding gene cluster (mau), genes known to be involved in methylotrophy are well conserved between M. extorquens AM1 and M. extorquens PA1. In this paper we report four primary findings regarding methylotrophy in PA1. First, with a few notable exceptions, the repertoire of methylotrophy genes between PA1 and AM1 is extremely similar. Second, PA1 grows faster with higher yields compared to AM1 on C₁ and multi-C substrates in minimal media, but AM1 grows faster in rich medium. Third, deletion mutants in PA1 throughout methylotrophy modules have the same C₁ growth phenotypes observed in AM1. Finally, the precision of our growth assays revealed several unexpected growth phenotypes for various knockout mutants that serve as leads for future work in understanding their basis and generality across Methylobacterium strains.

A shift from magnitude to sign epistasis during adaptive evolution of a bacterial social trait

Although the importance of epistasis in evolution has long been recognized, remarkably little is known about the processes by which epistatic interactions evolve in real time in specific biological systems. Here, we have characterized how the epistatic fitness relationship between a social gene and an adapting genome changes radically over a short evolutionary time frame in the social bacterium Myxococcus xanthus. We show that a highly beneficial effect of this social gene in the ancestral genome is gradually reduced--and ultimately reversed into a deleterious effect--over the course of an experimental adaptive trajectory in which a primitive form of novel cooperation evolved. This reduction and reversal of a positive social allelic effect is driven solely by changes in the genetic context in which the gene is expressed as new mutations are sequentially fixed during adaptive evolution, and explicitly demonstrates a significant evolutionary change in the genetic architecture of an ecologically important social trait.

Metabolic erosion primarily through mutation accumulation, and not tradeoffs, drives limited evolution of substrate specificity in Escherichia coli

Evolutionary adaptation to a constant environment is often accompanied by specialization and a reduction of fitness in other environments. We assayed the ability of the Lenski Escherichia coli populations to grow on a range of carbon sources after 50,000 generations of adaptation on glucose. Using direct measurements of growth rates, we demonstrated that declines in performance were much less widespread than suggested by previous results from Biolog assays of cellular respiration. Surprisingly, there were many performance increases on a variety of substrates. In addition to the now famous example of citrate, we observed several other novel gains of function for organic acids that the ancestral strain only marginally utilized. Quantitative growth data also showed that strains with a higher mutation rate exhibited significantly more declines, suggesting that most metabolic erosion was driven by mutation accumulation and not by physiological tradeoffs. These reductions in growth by mutator strains were ameliorated by growth at lower temperature, consistent with the hypothesis that this metabolic erosion is largely caused by destabilizing mutations to the associated enzymes. We further hypothesized that reductions in growth rate would be greatest for substrates used most differently from glucose, and we used flux balance analysis to formulate this question quantitatively. To our surprise, we found no significant relationship between decreases in growth and dissimilarity to glucose metabolism. Taken as a whole, these data suggest that in a single resource environment, specialization does not mainly result as an inevitable consequence of adaptive tradeoffs, but rather due to the gradual accumulation of disabling mutations in unused portions of the genome.