10.7554/eLife.05826.001 E. coli's hardiness, versatility, broad palate and ease of handling
have made it the most intensively studied and best understood organism on the planet. …

BACKGROUND Evolution is a strongly historical process, and evolutionary biology is a field
that combines history and science. How the historical nature of evolution affects the …

The role of historical contingency in evolution has been much debated, but rarely tested.
Twelve initially identical populations of Escherichia coli were founded in 1988 to investigate this …

Evolutionary novelties have been important in the history of life, but their origins are usually
difficult to examine in detail. We previously described the evolution of a novel trait, aerobic …

Many populations live in environments subject to frequent biotic and abiotic changes.
Nonetheless, it is interesting to ask whether an evolving population's mean fitness can increase …

10.7554/eLife.09696.001 Evolutionary innovations that enable organisms to colonize new
ecological niches are rare compared to gradual evolutionary changes in existing traits. We …

A fitness landscape is a map between the genotype and its reproductive success in a given
environment. The topography of fitness landscapes largely governs adaptive dynamics, …

Evolutionary innovations allow populations to colonize new ecological niches. We previously
reported that aerobic growth on citrate (Cit + ) evolved in an Escherichia coli population …

In a long-term evolution experiment with Escherichia coli, bacteria in one of twelve populations
evolved the ability to consume citrate, a previously unexploited resource in a glucose-…

Biological evolution is a fundamentally historical phenomenon in which intertwined stochastic
and deterministic processes shape lineages with long, continuous histories that exist in a …