Evolutionary Rescue - bridging the gap between theory and experiments

Session

Contribution

1 Jul 2025, 11:00

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology

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...

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...

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...

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. ...

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.,...