Trends in Ecology & Evolution
ReviewFeature ReviewExperimental evolution
Section snippets
Experimental evolution as a research tool
Evolutionary theories are usually inspired and tested by studying patterns of, for example, phylogeny, divergence between species or populations, variation within populations, genome structure, and genome sequence, which all reflect past evolution. Experimental evolution is an alternative research framework that offers the opportunity to study evolutionary processes experimentally in real time. The past decade has seen the fast growth of studies that tap into this potential, fuelled both by an
Applications
Experimental evolution has been used to address diverse questions in many areas of evolutionary biology. Here, we discuss several major types of question, keeping in mind that different questions are often addressed in a single experiment. We also address the advantages of long-term experiments and some practical applications of experimental evolution.
Study system
Many questions in evolutionary biology apply to a broad range of organisms or even to all. Thus, the choice of the study system becomes largely a matter of convenience. As a result, most evolutionary experiments have used one of several favorites, in particular E. coli, Pseudomonas, yeast, and Drosophila (Table 1). Several phage-bacteria systems and Daphnia with its pathogens have been widely used to address questions about coevolution (Box 3). The relative paucity of evolution experiments on
Timescale and serendipity
Numerous success stories notwithstanding, experimental evolution has some limitations as a research approach, and the conclusions from evolutionary experiments are subject to caveats. Although experimental evolution can be extremely fast, some evolutionary processes may be too slow to be seen within the span of a research grant or even a researcher's professional lifetime. Limited insight from experimental evolution into speciation is a case in point; although a measurable degree of
Experimental evolution in the field
Some of the concerns discussed above can be circumvented by performing evolution experiments in natural environments. A pioneering evolution experiment in the field was initiated in 1976 by transferring a guppy (Poecilia reticulata) population between environments with different predation regimes, leading to seminal insights into the evolution of life histories, sexual signaling, mate preferences, and predator–prey coevolution 4, 93, 94, 95. Despite this early and successful start, there have
Concluding remarks
The potential value of experimental evolution as a research approach has long been recognized; a book published in 1892 and entitled Experimental Evolution proposed using this methodology to resolve the controversy between the Darwinian and Lamarckian theories of evolution [100]. The past decade has seen increasing application of experimental evolution to an expanding range of questions, while advances in genomic technology are beginning to provide unprecedented insights into the genetic and
Acknowledgments
T.J.K. and D.E. are supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation. R.E.L.’s research is supported by the US National Science Foundation (DEB-1019989 and Cooperative Agreement DBI-0939454). I.O. is supported by CNRS (PICS to IO and Sara Magalhães), Institut Universitaire de France, and French National Research Agency (ANR, project GENEVOLSPE); M.C.W. is supported by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (Canada). We thank two anonymous reviewers for comments, and D.J. Kemp, M.
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