Understanding the evolution of microbial diversity is an important and current problem in evolutionary ecology. In this paper, we investigated the role of two established biochemical trade-offs in microbial diversification using a model that connects ecological and evolutionary processes with fundamental aspects of biochemistry. The trade-offs that we investigated are as follows:(1) a trade-off between the rate and affinity of substrate transport; and (2) a trade-off between the rate and yield of ATP production. Our model shows that these biochemical trade-offs can drive evolutionary diversification under the simplest possible ecological conditions: a homogeneous environment containing a single limiting resource. We argue that the results of a number of microbial selection experiments are consistent with the predictions of our model. © 2007 The Authors.
CITATION STYLE
Gudelj, I., Beardmore, R. E., Arkin, S. S., & Maclean, R. C. (2007). Constraints on microbial metabolism drive evolutionary diversification in homogeneous environments. Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 20(5), 1882–1889. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1420-9101.2007.01376.x
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