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Time-shift experiments and patterns of adaptation across time and space.
François Blanquart1, Sylvain Gandon
1Centre d'Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive, Unité Mixte de Recherche, Montpellier Cedex, France. francois.blanquart@cefe.cnrs.fr
Ecology Letters
|October 5, 2012
Summary
Time-shift experiments reveal how populations adapt over time. This method decomposes mean fitness into environmental, genetic, and temporal adaptation effects, showing adaptation is often strongest recently.
Area of Science:
- Evolutionary biology
- Population genetics
- Quantitative genetics
Background:
- Time-shift experiments measure population fitness across different time points.
- Understanding adaptation requires disentangling environmental and genetic influences.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop a method for decomposing mean fitness using time-shift data.
- To analyze the pattern and drivers of 'temporal adaptation'.
- To link temporal adaptation with local adaptation.
Main Methods:
- Derivation of analytical results for temporal adaptation patterns.
- Decomposition of mean fitness into environmental, genetic, and temporal components.
- Application to HIV adaptation data.
Main Results:
- Temporal adaptation is generally maximal in the recent past.
- Analytical framework for understanding adaptation dynamics.
- Demonstration of the method's utility with real-world data.
Conclusions:
- The proposed decomposition method offers new insights into evolutionary dynamics.
- Temporal adaptation patterns can inform our understanding of local adaptation.
- The approach is applicable to various biological systems, including pathogen evolution.
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