Section: New Results

Dynamics of mutator strains

In a long-lasting collaboration with Utrecht University, we studied the dynamics of mutator strains in constant environments (mutator strains being individuals which mutation rate is increased by several orders of magnitude). Contrary to what is generally admitted, we showed that, although mutators initially suffer from a mutational burden (in coherence with the theory), they are able to quickly recover and avoid the burden. Moreover, we showed that they do so by contracting their coding genome compartment and expanding their non-coding compartment. This result show that mutators can thrive even in a constant environment (rutten et al., 2019).