Adaptation increases the likelihood of diversification in an experimental bacterial lineage.

Understanding the mechanisms and processes that generate biological diversity is a fundamental problem in evolution and ecology. In the past decade, the theory of evolutionary branching and adaptive diversification has provided new perspectives for understanding the evolution of diversity caused by ecological interactions. In models of adaptive diversification, the fitness landscapes change dynamically, so that the likelihood of diversification into different phenotypic clusters increases over time. In contrast, in models with static fitness landscapes, the likelihood of diversification decreases as populations climb fitness peaks, because crossing maladaptive fitness valleys becomes increasingly difficult. We used experimental evolution in bacteria to test how the likelihood of diversification changes over time in a bacterial lineage that has diversified in sympatry from a single ancestral strain. By analyzing the "fossil" record of this lineage, and restarting the lineage from different time points in the evolutionary past, we demonstrate that: (i) the lineage has initially undergone a phase of directional adaptation to the competitive environment, and (ii) during this phase, the likelihood of diversification increases significantly over time. These results suggest evolutionary branching caused by frequency-dependent competition as the main mechanism of diversification in our experimental populations.