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Updated: Oct 23, 2025

Daily Transfers, Archiving Populations, and Measuring Fitness in the Long-Term Evolution Experiment with Escherichia coli
Published on: August 18, 2023
Evolution in a Community Context: towards Understanding the Causes and Consequences of Adaptive Evolution in the
1APC Microbiome Ireland and School of Microbiology, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland.
Abstract:
How important is adaptive evolution to the unique diversity that we can observe for each individual human gut microbiome? How do gut microbes evolve in response to changes in their environment, and how does evolution in real time impact microbial functionality in the context of host health? My interdisciplinary research uses in vitro microcosm models to test how different abiotic and biotic factors impact microbial evolution in a community context. We complement this approach by tracking focal species as they evolve in real time and in their natural environment of the human gut. Our aim is to provide a better understanding of how the dynamics and outcomes of microbial evolution differ between individual gut environments, and in response to different selection pressures, so that we can move closer to rational gut microbiome treatments that promote host health and prevent and treat human disease.
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