title: Fidelity drive: a mechanism for chaperone proteins to maintain stable mutation rates in prokaryotes over evolutionary time.
abstract: We show a mechanism by which chaperone proteins can play a key role in maintaining the long-term evolutionary stability of mutation rates in prokaryotes with perfect genetic linkage. Since chaperones can reduce the phenotypic effects of mutations, higher mutation rate, by affecting chaperones, can increase the phenotypic effects of mutations. This in turn leads to greater mutation effect among the proteins that control mutation repair and DNA replication, resulting in large changes in mutation rate. The converse of this is that when mutation rate is low and chaperones are functioning well, then the rate of change in mutation rate will also be low, leading to low mutation rates being evolutionarily frozen. We show that the strength of this recursion is critical to determining the long-term evolutionary patterns of mutation rate among prokaryotes. If this recursion is weak, then mutation rates can grow without bound, leading to the extinction of the lineage. However, if this recursion is strong, then we can reproduce empirical patterns of prokaryotic mutation rates, where mutation rates remain stable over evolutionary time, and where most mutation rates are low, but with a significant fraction of high mutators.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, McGill University, 1205 Docteur Penfield, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Electronic address: zhunping.xue@mail.mcgill.ca.
authors.forename: Julian Z
authors.initials: JZ
authors.lastname: Xue
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science, McGill University, Montreal, Canada.
authors.forename: Artem
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kaznatcheev
authors.affiliation: Department of Anthropology, McGill University, Montreal, Canada.
authors.forename: Andre
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Costopoulos
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, McGill University, 1205 Docteur Penfield, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
authors.forename: Frederic
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Guichard
mesh_terms: D005075:Biological Evolution; D008954:Models, Biological; D018832:Molecular Chaperones / Q000378:metabolism*; D059645:Mutation Rate; D011387:Prokaryotic Cells / Q000378:metabolism*; D013997:Time Factors
chemical_list: D018832:Molecular Chaperones
keywords: Evolution of mutation; Mutation rate; Mutator strains; Natural distribution of mutation rate; Second-order selection