Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115, USA.
Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science and School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia.
Science. 2014 Sep 12;345(6202):1346-9. doi: 10.1126/science.1254421.
A key question in ecology and evolution is the relative role of natural selection and neutral evolution in producing biogeographic patterns. We quantify the role of neutral processes by simulating division, mutation, and death of 100,000 individual marine bacteria cells with full 1 million-base-pair genomes in a global surface ocean circulation model. The model is run for up to 100,000 years and output is analyzed using BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) alignment and metagenomics fragment recruitment. Simulations show the production and maintenance of biogeographic patterns, characterized by distinct provinces subject to mixing and periodic takeovers by neighbors (coalescence), after which neutral evolution reestablishes the province and the patterns reorganize. The emergent patterns are substantial (e.g., down to 99.5% DNA identity between North and Central Pacific provinces) and suggest that microbes evolve faster than ocean currents can disperse them. This approach can also be used to explore environmental selection.
一个生态学和进化领域的关键问题是自然选择和中性进化在产生生物地理模式方面的相对作用。我们通过在全球表层海洋环流模型中模拟 10 万个具有完整 100 万个碱基对基因组的海洋细菌细胞的分裂、突变和死亡，来量化中性过程的作用。该模型的运行时间长达 10 万年，输出结果使用 BLAST（基本局部比对搜索工具）比对和宏基因组片段招募进行分析。模拟结果显示出生物地理模式的产生和维持，其特征是存在明显的地域，这些地域会受到混合和周期性的邻域接管（合并）的影响，之后中性进化会重新建立地域，模式会重新组织。这些新兴的模式非常显著（例如，北太平洋和中太平洋地域之间的 DNA 同一性低至 99.5%），表明微生物的进化速度比洋流的扩散速度还要快。这种方法也可以用来探索环境选择。
