Yoav Ram, Eynat Dellus-Gur, Maayan Bibi, Kedar Karkare, Uri Obolski, Marcus W Feldman, Tim F Cooper, Judith Berman, Lilach Hadany
Determining the fitness of specific microbial genotypes has extensive application in microbial genetics, evolution, and biotechnology. While estimates from growth curves are simple and allow high throughput, they are inaccurate and do not account for interactions between costs and benefits accruing over different parts of a growth cycle. For this reason, pairwise competition experiments are the current "gold standard" for accurate estimation of fitness. However, competition experiments require distinct markers, making them difficult to perform between isolates derived from a common ancestor or between isolates of nonmodel organisms...
July 16, 2019: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America