How eukaryotic algae can adapt to the Spain's Rio Tinto: A neo-Darwinian proposal for rapid adaptation to an extremely hostile ecosystem

Abstract

• Microalgae contributed 60% of the total biomass in the extremely hostile (pH 2 and metal-rich waters) environment of Rio Tinto (which is used as a model for the astrobiology of Mars). These algae are closely related to nonextreme lineages, suggesting that adaptation to Rio Tinto water (RTW) must occur rapidly. • Fitness from both the microalga Dictyosphaerium chlorelloides and the cyanobacterium Microcystis aeruginosa was inhibited when they were cultured in RTW. After further incubation for several weeks, D. chlorelloides survived, as a result of the growth of a variant that was resistant to RTW, but RTW-resistant cells did not appear in M. aeruginosa • A Luria-Delbrück fluctuation test revealed that D. chlorelloides RTW-resistant cells arose randomly by rare spontaneous mutations before the RTW exposure (1.38 × 10-6 mutants per cell division). The mutants with a diminished fitness are maintained in nonextreme waters as the result of a balance between new RTW-resistant cells arising by mutation and RTW-resistant mutants eliminated by natural selection (equilibrium at c. 15 RTW-resistant per 107 wild-type cells). • Rapid adaptation of eukaryotic algae to RTW could be the result of selection of RTW-resistant mutants occurring spontaneously in nonextreme populations that arrived fortuitously at the river in the past, or in the present continuously.