The red death meets the abdominal bristle: polygenic mutation for susceptibility to a bacterial pathogen in Caenorhabditis elegans.

Understanding the genetic basis of susceptibility to pathogens is an important goal of medicine and of evolutionary biology. A key first step toward understanding the genetics and evolution of any phenotypic trait is characterizing the role of mutation. However, the rate at which mutation introduces genetic variance for pathogen susceptibility in any organism is essentially unknown. Here, we quantify the per-generation input of genetic variance by mutation (VM) for susceptibility of Caenorhabditis elegans to the pathogenic bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa (defined as the median time of death, LT50). VM for LT50 is slightly less than VM for a variety of life-history and morphological traits in this strain of C. elegans, but is well within the range of reported values in a variety of organisms. Mean LT50 did not change significantly over 250 generations of mutation accumulation. Comparison of VM to the standing genetic variance (VG) implies a strength of selection against new mutations of a few tenths of a percent. These results suggest that the substantial standing genetic variation for susceptibility of C. elegans to P. aeruginosa can be explained by polygenic mutation coupled with purifying selection.

Invariance (?) of mutational parameters for relative fitness over 400 generations of mutation accumulation in Caenorhabditis elegans.

Evidence is accumulating that individuals in poor physiologic condition may accumulate mutational damage faster than individuals in good condition. If poor condition results from pre-existing deleterious mutations, the result is "fitness-dependent mutation rate," which has interesting theoretical implications. Here we report a study in which 10 mutation accumulation (MA) lines of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans that had previously accumulated mutations for 250 generations under relaxed selection were expanded into sets of "second-order" MA lines and allowed to accumulate mutations for an additional 150 generations. The 10 lines were chosen on the basis of the relative change in fitness over the first 250 generations of MA, five high-fitness lines and five low-fitness lines. On average, the mutational properties (per-generation change in mean relative fitness, mutational variance, and Bateman-Mukai estimates of genomic mutation rate and average mutational effect) of the high-fitness and low-fitness did not differ significantly, and averaged over all lines, the point estimates were extremely close to those of the first-order MA experiment after 200 generations of MA. However, several nonsignificant trends indicate that low-fitness lines may in fact be more likely to suffer mutational damage than high-fitness lines.