Rate and effects of spontaneous mutations that affect fitness in mutator Escherichia coli.

Knowledge of the mutational parameters that affect the evolution of organisms is of key importance in understanding the evolution of several characteristics of many natural populations, including recombination and mutation rates. In this study, we estimated the rate and mean effect of spontaneous mutations that affect fitness in a mutator strain of Escherichia coli and review some of the estimation methods associated with mutation accumulation (MA) experiments. We performed an MA experiment where we followed the evolution of 50 independent mutator lines that were subjected to repeated bottlenecks of a single individual for approximately 1150 generations. From the decline in mean fitness and the increase in variance between lines, we estimated a minimum mutation rate to deleterious mutations of 0.005 (+/-0.001 with 95% confidence) and a maximum mean fitness effect per deleterious mutation of 0.03 (+/-0.01 with 95% confidence). We also show that any beneficial mutations that occur during the MA experiment have a small effect on the estimate of the rate and effect of deleterious mutations, unless their rate is extremely large. Extrapolating our results to the wild-type mutation rate, we find that our estimate of the mutational effects is slightly larger and the inferred deleterious mutation rate slightly lower than previous estimates obtained for non-mutator E. coli.