BERTELS Frederic's profile
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BERTELS Frederic

  • Microbial Molecular Evolution, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Plön, Germany
  • Bioinformatics & Computational Biology, Evolutionary Dynamics, Evolutionary Theory, Experimental Evolution, Genetic conflicts, Genome Evolution, Molecular Evolution, Phylogenetics / Phylogenomics, Population Genetics / Genomics
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I am a Bioinformatician by training and generally interested in microbial evolution (especially in phage and bacteria), phylogenetics and repetitive sequences in bacterial genomes.

Recommendation:  1

04 Mar 2021
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Simulation of bacterial populations with SLiM

Simulating bacterial evolution forward-in-time

Recommended by based on reviews by 3 anonymous reviewers

Jean Cury and colleagues (2021) have developed a protocol to simulate bacterial evolution in SLiM. In contrast to existing methods that depend on the coalescent, SLiM simulates evolution forward in time. SLiM has, up to now, mostly been used to simulate the evolution of eukaryotes (Haller and Messer 2019), but has been adapted here to simulate evolution in bacteria. Forward-in-time simulations are usually computationally very costly. To circumvent this issue, bacterial population sizes are scaled down. One would now expect results to become inaccurate, however, Cury et al. show that scaled-down forwards simulations provide very accurate results (similar to those provided by coalescent simulators) that are consistent with theoretical expectations. Simulations were analyzed and compared to existing methods in simple and slightly more complex scenarios where recombination affects evolution. In all scenarios, simulation results from coalescent methods (fastSimBac (De Maio and Wilson 2017), ms (Hudson 2002)) and scaled-down forwards simulations were very similar, which is very good news indeed.

A biologist not aware of the complexities of forwards, backwards simulations and the coalescent, might now naïvely ask why another simulation method is needed if existing methods perform just as well. To address this question the manuscript closes with a very neat example of what exactly is possible with forwards simulations that cannot be achieved using existing methods. The situation modeled is the growth and evolution of a set of 50 bacteria that are randomly distributed on a petri dish. One side of the petri dish is covered in an antibiotic the other is antibiotic-free. Over time, the bacteria grow and acquire antibiotic resistance mutations until the entire artificial petri dish is covered with a bacterial lawn. This simulation demonstrates that it is possible to simulate extremely complex (e.g. real world) scenarios to, for example, assess whether certain phenomena are expected with our current understanding of bacterial evolution, or whether there are additional forces that need to be taken into account. Hence, forwards simulators could significantly help us to understand what current models can and cannot explain in evolutionary biology.  

 

References  

Cury J, Haller BC, Achaz G, Jay F (2021) Simulation of bacterial populations with SLiM. bioRxiv, 2020.09.28.316869, version 5 peer-reviewed and recommended by Peer community in Evolutionary Biology.  https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.09.28.316869

De Maio N, Wilson DJ (2017) The Bacterial Sequential Markov Coalescent. Genetics, 206, 333–343. https://doi.org/10.1534/genetics.116.198796

Haller BC, Messer PW (2019) SLiM 3: Forward Genetic Simulations Beyond the Wright–Fisher Model. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 36, 632–637. https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msy228

Hudson RR (2002) Generating samples under a Wright–Fisher neutral model of genetic variation. Bioinformatics, 18, 337–338. https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/18.2.337

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BERTELS Frederic

  • Microbial Molecular Evolution, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Plön, Germany
  • Bioinformatics & Computational Biology, Evolutionary Dynamics, Evolutionary Theory, Experimental Evolution, Genetic conflicts, Genome Evolution, Molecular Evolution, Phylogenetics / Phylogenomics, Population Genetics / Genomics
  • recommender

Recommendation:  1

Reviews:  0

Areas of expertise
I am a Bioinformatician by training and generally interested in microbial evolution (especially in phage and bacteria), phylogenetics and repetitive sequences in bacterial genomes.