The rate of adaptive evolution in enteric bacteria.

Here we estimate the rate of adaptive substitution in a set of 410 genes that are present in 6 Escherichia coli and 6 Salmonella enterica genomes. We estimate that more than 50% of amino acid substitutions in this set of genes have been fixed by positive selection between the E. coli and S. enterica lineages. We also show that the proportion of adaptive substitutions is uncorrelated with the rate of amino acid substitution or gene function but that it may be correlated with levels of synonymous codon usage bias.