Fitness declines in Tobacco etch virus upon serial bottleneck transfers

It has been well established that populations of RNA viruses transmitted throughout serial bottlenecks suffer from significant fitness declines as a consequence of the accumulation of deleterious mutations by the onset of Muller's ratchet. Bottlenecks are unavoidably linked to different steps of the infectious cycle of most plant RNA viruses, such as vector-mediated transmissions and systemic colonization of new leaves. Here we report evidence for fitness declines by the accumulation of deleterious mutations in the potyvirus Tobacco etch virus (TEV). TEV was inoculated into the nonsystemic host Chenopodium quinoa, and local lesions were isolated and used to initiate 20 independent mutation accumulation lineages. Weekly, a random lesion from each lineage was isolated and used to inoculate the next set of plants. At each transfer, the Malthusian growth rate was estimated. After 11 consecutive transfers, all lineages suffered significant fitness losses, and one even became extinct. The average rate of fitness decline was 5% per day. The average pattern of fitness decline was consistent with antagonistic epistasis between deleterious mutations, as postulated for antiredundant genomes. Temporal fitness fluctuations were not explained by random noise but reflected more complex underlying processes related to emergence and self-organization phenomena.