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Systematic Changes In Gene Expression Patterns Following Adaptive Evolution In Yeast, Tracy L. Ferea, David Botstein, Patrick O. Brown, R. Frank Rosenzweig

Biological Sciences Faculty Publications

Culturing a population of Saccharomyces cerevisiae for many generations under conditions to which it is not optimally adapted selects for fitter genetic variants. This simple experimental design provides a tractable model of adaptive evolution under natural selection. Beginning with a clonal, founding population, independently evolved strains were obtained from three independent cultures after continuous aerobic growth in glucose-limited chemostats for more than 250 generations. DNA microarrays were used to compare genome-wide patterns of gene expression in the evolved strains and the parental strain. Several hundred genes were found to have significantly altered expression in the evolved strains. Many of these …