Do bacteria with fast doubling times evolve faster than bacteria with relatively slower doubling times?
Has this been measured? I would suspect that there is a correlation, but I wonder if necessarily so.
I have just stumbled upon a case in which two strains of closely related bacteria (16S = 98.4% sequence identity), which are well known to grow tremendously slow (in the lab) appear as if they are displaying substantially higher rates of evolution than expected (e.g. other ortholog proteins in these strains are a lot more divergent than in other strains with similar 16S level of identity).
The other possibility I can think off is that they are actually evolving tremendously slowly, in such a way that the level of sequence identity between their 16S belies their deep divergence, allowing more time for other proteins to diverge further given their extremely slow doubling times (e.g. weeks rather than hours).
Any good references on this topic? What do you think? Thanks.
All the best,
Tanai
It's quite likely that organisms with higher doubling time will have greater sequence homology and evolutionary conserved sequences. The chances of introduction of the mutations are more in genome when doubling time is small. Your observations are really valid!
Shamsher S. Kanwar Thanks, yeah, I see what you mean; but are mutations not more like to be introduced during errors in genome replication? So, in bacteria that double faster the genome would experience more replications, increasing the chance of errors and the rate of mutation?
Or is it that bacteria with faster doubling times are more likely to have greater populations, which then would decrease the change of amino acid substitutions to be fixed? Or something like that, is there such a thing?
Anyways, I'm just trying to understand the molecular mechanism behind such effects. Thanks for your response.
The error in the genome means mutation's; sense or missense ones!
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