Extreme Sensitivity of Fitness to Environmental Conditions: Lessons from #1BigBatch

• DOI: 10.1007/s00239-023-10114-3
• Publication Date: 2023-05-27T02:01:21Z
• Authors: Grant Kinsler; Kara Schmidlin; Daphne Newell; Rachel Eder; Sam Apodaca; Grace Lam; Dmitri Petrov; Kerry Geiler-Same...
• Keywords: Extreme environment

The phrase "survival of the fittest" has become an iconic descriptor how natural selection works. And yet, precisely measuring fitness, even for single-celled microbial populations growing in controlled laboratory conditions, remains a challenge. While numerous methods exist to perform these measurements, including recently developed utilizing DNA barcodes, all are limited their precision differentiate strains with small fitness differences. In this study, we rule out some major sources imprecision, but still find that measurements vary substantially from replicate replicate. Our data suggest very subtle and difficult avoid environmental differences between replicates create systematic variation across measurements. We conclude by discussing should be interpreted given extreme environment dependence. This work was inspired scientific community who followed us gave tips as live tweeted high-replicate measurement experiment at #1BigBatch.