This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint.
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Abstract
Microorganisms display a stunning metabolic diversity. Understanding the origin of this diversity requires understanding how macroevolutionary processes such as innovation and diversification play out in the microbial world. Metabolic networks, which govern microbial resource use, can evolve through different mechanisms, e.g. horizontal gene transfer or de novo evolution of enzymes and pathways. This process is governed by a combination of environmental factors, determining selective pressures, and the constraints imposed by the complex genetic architecture of metabolic networks. In addition, many independent results hint that the process of niche construction, by which organisms actively modify their own and each other’s niches and selective pressures, could play a major role in microbial innovation and diversification. Yet, the general principles by which niche construction shapes microbial macroevolutionary patterns remain largely unexplored. Here, we discuss several new hypotheses and directions, and suggest metabolic modeling methods that could allow us to explore large-scale empirical genotype-phenotype-environment spaces in order to study the macroevolutionary effects of niche construction. We hope that this short piece will further stimulate a systematic and quantitative characterization of macroevolutionary patterns and processes in microbial metabolism.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.32942/osf.io/krc7f
Subjects
Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Evolution, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Population Biology, Systems Biology
Keywords
bacteria, fitness landscape, genotype-phenotype map, Macroevolution, metabolism, microbes, Niche construction
Dates
Published: 2021-05-31 14:02
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