Table 1.
List of yeast evolution experiments featured in this review
| Study | Selection regime | Founder strains | Experimental replicates | Sexual or asexual | Major results |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Parts et al. 2011 | Thermal stress | 2 | 2 | Asexual | Thermal stress QTL mapped with high resolution; candidate variants plateaued in frequency without fixing |
| Cubillos et al. 2013 | Thermal stress, arsenite, paraquat | 4 | 2 | Asexual | Stress resistance mapped to genomic regions with high resolution, including at the haplotype level; SGRP4X resource established |
| Burke et al. 2014 | Batch culture in rich media | 4 | 12 | Sexual | SGV drives adaptation in sexual populations; > fivefold replication needed for strong inference |
| McDonald & Desai 2016 | Batch culture in rich media | 1 | 6 sexual, 6 asexual | Both | Sex speeds adaptation by breaking Muller’s ratchet |
| Vásquez-Garcia et al. 2017 | Hydroxyurea, rapamycin | 2 | 6 or 8 per treatment | Asexual | SGV, de novo mutations, and genome instability all significant in the evolution of drug resistance |
| Kolsheleva et al. 2018 | Batch culture in rich media | 2 | 12 “frequent sex,” 12 “rare sex,” 12 asexual | Both | Increasing recombination increases the effectiveness of selection |
| Li et al. 2019 | Hydroxyurea, rapamycin | 4 | 8 per drug | Asexual | More initial SGV leads to more QTL and increases complexity of trait architecture |
| Leu et al. 2020 | Thermal and NaCl stress | 1 | 6 sexual, 6 asexual | Both | Sex facilitates adaptation to dynamic environments |
| Wing et al. 2020 | Freeze/thaw stress | 4 | 12 | Asexual | A single freeze–thaw stress QTL mapped; some SGV is lost during cryopreservation |
| Linder et al. 2022 | 16 chemical stressors | 18 | variable per treatment | Both | Adaptation is driven by selection on rare variants; many populations evolved “cheater” strategies that avoided sex |
| Ament-Velásquez et al. 2022 | Ethanol, salt, lithium acetate | 2 | 4 or 5 per treatment | Asexual | Asexual adaptation driven by both SGV and de novo mutations; less parallelism observed in treatments with stronger selection |
| Phillips et al. 2022 | Ethanol | 12 | 20 per treatment | Sexual | Distinct adaptive responses observed in treatments with different selection intensities |
These studies are distinct from traditional yeast evolution experiments in that they either begin with ancestral populations that harbor standing genetic variation and/or they impose sexual cycles to shuffle genetic variation as the experiment proceeds