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Science 17 March 2006:
Vol. 311. no. 5767, p. 1517
DOI: 10.1126/science.311.5767.1517o
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An asexual population undergoing selection, such as cancer cells or a virus switching its host-range, may experience clonal interference, in which numerous beneficial mutations create competing lineages. Hegreness et al. (p. 1615) use numerical simulations and analysis of mixed and marked bacterial populations to show that, regardless of the underlying distribution of individual mutant cells, the evolution of a population can be approximated by an equivalent model, in which all beneficial mutations confer the same fitness advantage. This equivalence principle can be used to predict other measures of adaptation in such populations, including the degree of polymorphism and the average fitness of mutant lineages.




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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)