Accelerated evolution and Muller’s Rachet in endosymbiotic bacteria
Open accessAbstract
Many bacteria live only within animal cells and infect hosts through cytoplasmic inheritance. These endosymbiotic lineages show distinctive population structure, with small population size and effectively no recombination. As a result, endosymbionts are expected to accumulate mildly deleterious mutations. If these constitute a substantial proportion of new mutations, endosymbionts will show (i) faster sequence evolution and (ii) a possible shift in base composition reflecting mutational bias. Analyses of 16S rDNA of five independently derived endosymbiont clades show, in every case, faster evolution in endosymbionts than in free-living relatives. For aphid endosymbionts (genus Buchnera), coding genes exhibit accelerated evolution and unusually low ratios of synonymous to nonsynonymous substitutions compared to ratios for the same genes for enterics. This concentration of the rate increase in nonsynonymous substitutions is expected under the hypothesis of increased fixation of deleterious mutations. Polypeptides for all Buchnera genes analyzed have accumulated amino acids with codon families rich in A+T, supporting the hypothesis that substitutions are deleterious in terms of polypeptide function. These observations are best explained as the result of Muller's ratchet within small asexual populations, combined with mutational bias. In light of this explanation, two observations reported earlier for Buchnera, the apparent loss of a repair gene and the overproduction of a chaperonin, may reflect compensatory evolution. An alternative hypothesis, involving selection on genomic base composition, is contradicted by the observation that the speedup is concentrated at nonsynonymous sites.
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Relaxed selection has been implicated as both a driver of speciation and a precursor to extinction.
“Relaxed selection has also been implicated as both a driver of speciation (Templeton 2008) and a precursor to extinction (Moran 1996).”
From RELAX: Detecting Relaxed Selection in a Phylogenetic Framework (2015) · cites this paper as Moran 1996
The effective population size of bacterial endosymbionts is smaller than that of their free-living relatives, partially due to the transmission bottleneck across insect generations.
“The effective population size of bacterial endosymbionts is smaller than that of their free-living relatives, partially due to the transmission bottleneck across insect generations (Moran 1996;Funk et al. 2001;Herbeck et al. 2003).”
From RELAX: Detecting Relaxed Selection in a Phylogenetic Framework (2015) · cites this paper as Moran 1996
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“A general inefficiency of natural selection (especially purifying selection) has been suggested previously for intracellular bacteria, based in part on observations that these bacteria have higher evolutionary rates than free-living bacteria (e.g., Moran 1996).”
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“This trend is indeed strikingly apparent in microbes whose life style leads to curtailment of HGT, such as obligate endosymbiotic bacteria (Moran 1996; Mamirova et al. 2007; Moran et al. 2008).”
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- Authors
- Moran, N. A.
- Affiliations
- University of Arizona (US)
- Corresponding author
- Moran, N A
- ORCID
- Moran, N A
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 1996-04-02
- Volume
- 93
- Issue
- 7
- Pages
- 2873-2878
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- PMC
- PMC39726
- OpenAlex
- W1968179480
- Cited by
- 1,017
- References
- 1
- Citations by year
- 2026: 17 · 2025: 26 · 2024: 24 · 2023: 24 · 2022: 44 · 2021: 61 · 2020: 44 · 2019: 25 · 2018: 49 · 2017: 43 · 2016: 51 · 2015: 27 · 2014: 59 · 2013: 40 · 2012: 33
- FWCI
- 39.88
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- europepmc.org
- Locations
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Insect Science › Insect symbiosis and bacterial influences
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Genetics › Evolution and Genetic Dynamics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies
- Keywords
- Muller's ratchet, endosymbiotic bacteria, Buchnera, aphid endosymbionts, deleterious mutation accumulation, mutational bias, nonsynonymous substitution rate, synonymous substitution rate, cytoplasmic inheritance, asexual populations, compensatory evolution, 16S rRNA gene, nucleotide composition
- MeSH terms
- Animals, Aphids, Codon, DNA, Bacterial, DNA, Ribosomal, Escherichia coli, Biological Evolution, Insecta, Lactobacillus, RNA, Ribosomal, 16S, Salmonella typhimurium, Symbiosis
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