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. 2013 Jan 3;6(3):535–548. doi: 10.1111/eva.12041

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Journal compilation © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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The simple competition experiment is one of the most powerful tools in experimental evolution. It allows ancestral and evolved populations to be directly competed to provide an estimate of relative fitness between populations under defined ecological conditions. Ancestral and evolved populations are grown separately, and then mixed at a 1:1 frequency. They are allowed to grow and compete, after which the frequency of each population is estimated by plating a subset of cells onto a hard media and counting each colony type (cells may need to be tagged to allow differentiation). After Elena and Lenski (2003) and Buckling et al. (2009).