Figure 1.

Recombination can create all 50 carbon-use phenotypes considered here. (A) The horizontal axis shows the number of innovative recombinant offspring (out of 1,000,000 offspring) resulting from recombination between parents viable exclusively on the carbon source specified on the vertical axis. (B) Shown here is the number of innovative recombinants (per 1,000,000 offspring) gaining viability on the novel carbon source specified on the horizontal axis. (C) Shown here is the number of innovative recombinant (per 1,000,000 offspring, coded according to the color legend) resulting from recombination between parents viable exclusively on the carbon source specified in (A), which have gained viability on the novel carbon source specified in (B). In these analyses, parental metabolic networks contain ||G|| = 2079 reactions, the same number as the E. coli metabolic network, and they differ in D = 100 reactions. Moreover, n = 10 reactions are swapped between parental metabolic networks during recombination.