Login

Evolutionary Rescue - bridging the gap between theory and experiments

29 June 2025 to 3 July 2025
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology
Europe/Berlin timezone

Contact

Contribution List

32 / 32
5. Feller diffusion approximations for analyzing Luria Delbrück experiments
Guillaume Martin
30/06/2025, 18:30

The Luria Delbrück experiment has 80 years of history and is arguably the most widely used method of analyzing evolutionary rescue (ER) in microbes. It consists in growing replicate, initially clonal, populations in permissive conditions then abruptly switching each replicate onto a petri dish containing selective lethal conditions (eg antibiotics or lytic phages). Finally, the number of...
6. Quantifying stochastic establishment of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and the impact of biotic interactions
Helen Alexander
01/07/2025, 09:30

Stochastic establishment of adaptive genotypes (survival and outgrowth of initially rare lineages) is a key step in evolutionary rescue. Despite featuring in theoretical models, this process has received little attention in experimental biology. Here I will describe how we can quantify the probability of establishment with low-tech, high-throughput experimental assays combined with statistical...
7. Undesired evolutionary rescue on small time scales: regrowth in time-kill experiments
Christin Nyhoegen, Nicole Zimmermann
01/07/2025, 11:00

Time-kill experiments are commonly used to characterise the pharmacodynamic properties of antibiotics. During these experiments, a bacterial population is exposed to a specific concentration of an antibiotic over time, typically lasting 24 hours. Given high enough concentrations, a decrease of the bacterial population can be observed, which is used to calculate the kill rate constant for the...
51. Dominance of resistance mutations in diploid and polyploid organsims
Alica Merkens
01/07/2025, 11:30

The evolution of resistance is a major challenge in medicine and agriculture. Organisms can evolve resistance through a variety of mechanisms, including target modification, metabolic changes, and efflux systems. In diploid or polyploid organsims, the dominance of resistance mutations has a strong influence on the dynamics of resistance evolution. The dominance of an allele can differ across...
37. Enhanced metabolic entanglement emerges during the evolution of an interkingdom microbial community
Jan-Luca Ariens
01/07/2025, 11:30

While different stages of mutualism can be observed in natural communities, the dynamics and mechanisms underlying the gradual erosion of independence of the initially autonomous organisms are not yet fully understood. In this study, by conducting the laboratory evolution on an engineered microbial community, we reproduce and molecularly track the stepwise progression towards enhanced partner...
40. Evolution of Antibiotic Tolerance
Jonas Guenzl
01/07/2025, 11:30

It became clear shortly after the discovery of the first antibiotics that bacteria are able to survive and evade antibiotic treatment. Ever since, understanding the emergence of antimicrobial resistance is of great interest and a large number of studies have addressed the mechanisms of bacterial evolution in the presence of antibiotics. However, such studies often focus exclusively on...
31. Evolutionary Rescue in the Fields: Probability and Waiting Time for Herbicide Resistance
Dana Lauenroth
01/07/2025, 11:30

The recurrent exposure to herbicides in agricultural landscapes forces weeds to adapt in a race against extinction. What role newly arising mutations and pre-existing variation play in this evolution of herbicide resistance is critical for developing management strategies. In this talk, I will present a multitype Galton-Watson process model of rapid adaptation in response to strong...
48. Genetic Adaptation to Environmental Change in Experimental Populations
Salvatore Bannò
01/07/2025, 11:30

Theoretical models suggest that when the environment fluctuates slowly over hundreds of generations, populations primarily adapt to the environmental optimum through genetic changes rather than relying on phenotypic plasticity. Experimental evolution shows that gradual environmental change promotes the accumulation of smaller-effect mutations, leading to greater fitness than adapting to a...
30. Microbiome-Mediated Evolutionary Rescue
Bob Week
01/07/2025, 11:30

Host-associated microbiomes are increasingly recognized as key players in adaptive evolution, shaping host responses to environmental stressors and exhibiting varying degrees of heritability across generations. Given their potential to influence host fitness, microbiomes may play a crucial role in facilitating evolutionary rescue. However, the conditions under which microbiomes promote...
29. Modeling the early dynamics of urinary tract infections and resistance evolution
Amanda de Azevedo-Lopes
01/07/2025, 11:30

Treatment of urinary tract infections (UTIs) and the prevention of their recurrence is a pressing global health problem. In a UTI, pathogenic bacteria not only reside in the bladder lumen but also attach to and invade the bladder tissue. Planktonic, attached, and intracellular bacteria face different selection pressures from physiological processes such as micturition, immune response, and...
46. Stochastic Evolution of Resistance in Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia
Qianci Yang
01/07/2025, 11:30

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is a type of cancer in which the bone marrow produces too many lymphocytes without further differentiation into mature blood cells. The primary treatment for most ALL cases is chemotherapy; however, after the intense treatment phase, relapse is observed in some patients. Early-stage relapses might be due to some remaining leukemia cells not being detectable...
39. Die fast and live: How cell death drives the collective survival of beta-lactamase producing bacteria
Joachim Krug
01/07/2025, 13:30

Beta-lactams are the most commonly prescribed antibiotics, and beta-lactamases are ancient enzymes that have evolved to degrade these drugs. When beta-lactamase producing bacteria are exposed to lethal drug concentrations, lysing cells release the enzyme to the medium, thereby contributing to the rescue and eventual recovery of the population. The talk will report on experiments with E. coli...
42. Extrachromosomal Genetic Elements as Drivers of Evolutionary Rescue in Bacteria and Yeast
Ian Dewan, Mario Santer
01/07/2025, 14:00

Extrachromosomal genetic elements play a key role in the evolution of many organisms, particularly in adaptation to environmental stressors such as antibiotics. These elements include plasmids in bacteria, as well as mitochondrial and plastid genomes and extrachromosomal circular DNA (eccDNA) in eukaryotes. They frequently occur in their hosts in multiple copies, allowing increased mutational...
35. How to prevent evolutionary rescue through sequential antibiotic therapy
Hinrich Schulenburg
01/07/2025, 14:30

Antimicrobial resistance represents a major threat to global health. The spread of resistance is essentially a consequence of evolutionary rescue: the use of antibiotics in medical treatment and animal husbandry can cause dramatic reductions in pathogen population size that may then be countered through evolutionary adaptation in the affected bacteria. Understanding the processes that underlie...
52. Evolution of species’ range and niche in changing environments can drive range fragmentation
Jitka Polechová
02/07/2025, 09:30

In times of accelerating climate change, there is an urgent need for a predictive theory of species’ range shifts, adaptation, and species’ resilience under changing environments. Current predictions are limited, as they rely on theory that neglects important interactions between ecological and evolutionary forces. I will demonstrate that the feedback between selection, genetic drift, and...
41. Can evolution save sick populations? Modeling evolutionary rescue in host-pathogen systems
Laurinne J Balstad
02/07/2025, 11:00

Across the last decade, emergent pathogens have been identified as a common threat to the conservation of charismatic species. Outbreaks of Bd fungus, devil facial tumor disease, and abalone withering syndrome have contributed to considerable population declines of amphibians, Tasmanian devils, and abalone, respectively. In these same populations, there might be evolution of disease resistance...
43. Byte and Thrive: Simulating Predator-Prey Dynamics in Changing Environments
Nicolas Armeni
02/07/2025, 11:30

Rapid environmental change exposes species to novel conditions, often threatening their long-term survival. Although factors such as genetic variability and mutation rates are well-established drivers of adaptation, the role of predation remains comparatively underexplored. Previous studies suggest that predators can paradoxically facilitate prey adaptation and thereby promoting prey...
47. Change in prey genotype frequency rescues predator from extinction
Ruben Hermann
02/07/2025, 11:30

Indirect evolutionary rescue (IER) is a mechanism where a non-evolving species is saved from extinction in an otherwise lethal environment by evolution in an interacting species. This process has been described in a predator–prey model, where extinction of the predator is prevented by a shift in the frequency of defended towards undefended prey when reduced predator densities lower selection...
49. EcoRaMa: The potential for evolutionary rescue at species range margins
Shengman Lyu
02/07/2025, 11:30

Almost all organisms have geographical distributions that are limited by range margins. But why? What prevents the evolution of local adaptation in populations at a range margin from allowing the species to expand its range into new territory? One idea is that marginal populations are small and genetically depauperate, with limited potential for local adaptation. Gene flow into such...
26. Evolution of a mutant on all four-demed metapopulations
Akanksha Singh
02/07/2025, 11:30

Multiple populations that are connected by migration create a metapopulation. This study looks at how the fixation probability of a mutant is affected by different migration patterns in various metapopulation structures composed of 4 demes, each having identical carrying capacities. We look at all possible 4-node network structures, where each node is a deme and each link represents migration....
38. Evolutionary Rescue in the Pacific Field Cricket?
Jannika Elfert
02/07/2025, 11:30

New selection pressures can cause rapid evolutionary change. This has, for example, been observed in the Pacific field cricket Teleogryllus oceanicus on Hawai’i, which is under harsh predation pressure from the parasitoid fly Ormia ochracea. The fly locates the male crickets by their mating calls and deposits its larvae on the cricket which gets eventually killed. Within less than 20...
27. Evolutionary rescue of niche constructors from habitat exploitation
Alexander Longcamp
02/07/2025, 11:30

Niche construction, the process by which an organism increases its fitness by modifying its environment, can promote population persistence by allowing niche constructors to restore the density of reproductively suitable habitats. However, niche-constructing populations can be vulnerable to exploitation by non-niche-constructing "cheaters" that benefit from the constructed habitats without...
33. Genetic rescue: Outbred or Inbred, who is the better rescuer?
George West
02/07/2025, 11:30

Anthropogenic changes mean that many populations are becoming increasingly small and isolated. The loss of fitness due to inbreeding, aka inbreeding depression, is a major concern for these populations, potentially contributing to their extinction. Genetic diversity can be introduced into the inbred population via the translocation of individuals (Genetic rescue), reducing inbreeding...
32. Increased fluctuation in a butterfly metapopulation leads to diploid males and decline of a hyperparasitoid
Etsuko Nonaka
02/07/2025, 11:30

Climate change can increase spatial synchrony of population dynamics, leading to large-scale fluctuation that destabilizes communities. High trophic level species such as parasitoids are disproportionally affected because they depend on unstable resources. Most parasitoid wasps have complementary sex determination, producing sterile males when inbred, which can theoretically lead to population...
34. Outbreeding management offers the promise of genetic rescue for an endangered lizard
Guannan Wen
02/07/2025, 11:30

Inbreeding and loss of genetic diversity increase the extinction risk of small isolated populations. Genetic rescue by augmenting gene flow is a powerful means for the restoration of lost genetic variation. In this study, we used multigenerational pedigrees and neutral genetic markers to assess the consequences of outbreeding management in the Chinese and Vietnamese populations of the...
23. Indirect Evolutionary Facilitation Promotes Community Resilience to Environmental Disturbances
Lutz Becks
02/07/2025, 13:30

Global environmental change threatens both the persistence of species and the stability of ecosystems, often demanding rapid evolutionary adaptation. While traditional perspectives have focused on evolutionary change within threatened species, this approach overlooks the crucial influence of evolutionary responses in interacting species. The likelihood and consequences of such indirect...
28. Does sexual recombination speed up adaptation of crop pathogens to fungicide mixtures?
Alexey Mikaberidze
02/07/2025, 17:30

Evolution of fungicide resistance in pathogens of crop plants is a prime example of rapid adaptation; and this problem is in many ways similar to evolutionary rescue scenarios. Fungicide resistance causes significant economic losses to crop production that are however difficult to estimate [Mikaberidze et al., 2025]. Fungicides are often applied as mixtures of two components belonging to...
50. Incorporating genetic basis of resistance into the evolutionary rescue of the Spotted-Winged Drosophila
Swati Patel
02/07/2025, 18:00

The Spotted-Winged Drosophila is an invasive pest that causes millions of dollars of damage to crops in Oregon as well as other places around the world. (Unlike its close relative, the model organism D. melanogaster, this pest feeds on fresh fruit.) While several insecticides are being used to mitigate this damage, there is evidence of decreased efficacy to some due to resistance evolution. ...
22. Experimental evidence for the role of population history and ecological contexts in evolutionary rescue
Laure Olazcuaga
03/07/2025, 09:30

Environmental change often occurs abruptly, placing natural populations at risk of extinction unless they adapt rapidly—a process known as evolutionary rescue. While theory and empirical work suggest that genetic variation, population size, and the degree of maladaptation influence the likelihood of rescue, the roles of population history and ecological interactions remain less well...
53. Founders predict trait evolution and population performance after evolutionary rescue in the red flour beetle
Vindra Ravi Kumar
03/07/2025, 11:00

Evolutionary rescue helps populations survive environmental change, but the phenotypic and demographic factors associated with rescue dynamics and its long-term effects remain unclear. We experimentally evolved 10 wild-collected populations of flour beetles from across India in a suboptimal corn resource for 70 generations (>5 years), collecting >10,000 population census points book-ended by...
45. The role of non-genetic architecture in evolutionary rescue: mechanisms, consequences and empirical evidence
Puneeth Deraje
03/07/2025, 13:30

In addition to its genetic basis, the phenotype on which evolutionary rescue is contingent can depend on non-genetic factors. These exist at different levels of biological organization, including epigenetics (e.g., DNA methylation), cellular and developmental processes (e.g., morphogenesis), behaviour (e.g., cultural traits like tool use), and inter and intra-species interactions (e.g.,...
54. Evolutionary rescue as a lens into classical evolutionary questions, including the evolution imprint of temporal variation
Robert D. Holt
03/07/2025, 14:00

Evolutionary rescue occurs when one or more populations are declining in abundance and occupancy, and are facing extinction because of environmental change, but adaptation by natural selection occurs sufficiently rapidly to boost mean fitness and abundance, permitting persistence in the changed environments. Understanding when rescue occurs, and when it does not, is pertinent not just to...
Powered by Indico v3.3.5