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Updated: Jun 23, 2026

Daily Transfers, Archiving Populations, and Measuring Fitness in the Long-Term Evolution Experiment with Escherichia coli
Published on: August 18, 2023
The pace of evolution across fitness valleys
Chaitanya S Gokhale1, Yoh Iwasa, Martin A Nowak
1Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Biology, August-Thienemann-Str. 2, 24306 Plön, Germany. gokhale@evolbio.mpg.de
Abstract:
How fast does a population evolve from one fitness peak to another? We study the dynamics of evolving, asexually reproducing populations in which a certain number of mutations jointly confer a fitness advantage. We consider the time until a population has evolved from one fitness peak to another one with a higher fitness. The order of mutations can either be fixed or random. If the order of mutations is fixed, then the population follows a metaphorical ridge, a single path. If the order of mutations is arbitrary, then there are many ways to evolve to the higher fitness state. We address the time required for fixation in such scenarios and study how it is affected by the order of mutations, the population size, the fitness values and the mutation rate.
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