Tuning environmental timescales to evolve and maintain generalists

Abstract

Natural environments can present diverse challenges, but some genotypes remain fit across many environments. Such `generalists' can be hard to evolve, out-competed by specialists fitter in any particular environment. Here, inspired by the search for broadly-neutralising antibodies during B-cell affinity maturation, we demonstrate that environmental changes on an intermediate timescale can reliably evolve generalists, even when faster or slower environmental changes are unable to do so. We find that changing environments on timescales comparable to evolutionary transients in a population enhances the rate of evolving generalists from specialists, without enhancing the reverse process. The yield of generalists is further increased in more complex dynamic environments, such as a `chirp' of increasing frequency. Our work offers design principles for how non-equilibrium fitness `seascapes' can dynamically funnel populations to genotypes unobtainable in static environments.

References in corpus (11)

• Life is physics: evolution as a collective phenomenon far from equilibrium
• Inferring processes underlying B-cell repertoire diversity
• Fluctuating fitness shapes the clone size distribution of immune repertoires
• Sequence Space Localization in the Immune System Response to Vaccination and Disease
• Physical epistatic landscape of antibody binding affinity
• Evolving generalists via dynamic sculpting of rugged landscapes
• Transitions in optimal adaptive strategies for populations in fluctuating environments
• Evolution of sparsity and modularity in a model of protein allostery
• The Birth-Death-Mutation process: a new paradigm for fat tailed distributions
• Stochastic and Information-thermodynamic Structures of Population Dynamics in Fluctuating Environment
• Quantifying the impact of a periodic presence of antimicrobial on resistance evolution in a homogeneous microbial population of fixed size

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Adapt or perish: Evolutionary rescue in a gradually deteriorating environment
• Optimal evolutionary control for artificial selection on molecular phenotypes
• Predicting in vivo escape dynamics of HIV-1 from a broadly neutralizing antibody
• Affinity maturation for an optimal balance between long-term immune coverage and short-term resource constraints