Scalable method to determine mutations that occur during adaptive evolution of Escherichia coli
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Updated: Sep 21, 2026

Following the Dynamics of Structural Variants in Experimentally Evolved Populations
Published on: February 3, 2023
Anuradha Raghunathan1, Bernhard O Palsson
1Department of Bioengineering, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0412, USA.
Abstract:
Denaturing HPLC was used to determine mutations occurring during the adaptive evolution of Escherichia coli K-12. The strains were evolved over 700 generations on glycerol as the sole carbon source from a sub-optimal to an optimal growth rate. The mutations detected by direct sequencing of amplicons of the glycerol-phosphate regulon repressor (glpR) gene were a synonymous substitution Val20Val in two separately evolved strains. Non-synonymous substitutions, Val119Gly and Gly179Trp, were also observed in each of the two strains. This procedure can be scaled to determine genome-scale sequence variations that have occurred during adaptive evolution.
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