Rise and Fall of Mutator Bacteria - The Evolution of Mutation Rates in Bacteria

This presentation was given at the BioMath Students Journal Club at Tel-Aviv University on May 2011. The evolution of the mutation rate in bacteria is a long-standing research theme for theoretical evolutionary biologists. As mutations are deleterious more often than not, the mutation rate is expected to be minimized. But because beneficial mutations are the ultimate source of adaptation in asexual populations, an elevated mutation rate is not always a bad thing. I will present a number of theoretical results and discuss my own work on the evolution of stress-induced mutators. The main articles discussed are: Leigh. Natural Selection and Mutability The American Naturalist, 1970 Taddei, Radman, Maynard-Smith, Toupance, Gouyon & Godelle. Role of mutator alleles in adaptive evolution. Nature, 1997 Ram & Hadany. The Evolution of Stress-Induced Hypermutation in Asexual Populations. Evolution, 2012.