1. Using colony size to measure fitness in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
- Author
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Miller, James H., Fasanello, Vincent J., Liu, Ping, Longan, Emery R., Botero, Carlos A., and Fay, Justin C.
- Subjects
SACCHAROMYCES cerevisiae ,MICROORGANISM populations ,MICROBIAL growth ,AGAR plates - Abstract
Competitive fitness assays in liquid culture have been a mainstay for characterizing experimental evolution of microbial populations. Growth of microbial strains has also been extensively characterized by colony size and could serve as a useful alternative if translated to per generation measurements of relative fitness. To examine fitness based on colony size, we established a relationship between cell number and colony size for strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae robotically pinned onto solid agar plates in a high-density format. This was used to measure growth rates and estimate relative fitness differences between evolved strains and their ancestors. After controlling for edge effects through both normalization and agar-trimming, we found that colony size is a sensitive measure of fitness, capable of detecting 1% differences. While fitnesses determined from liquid and solid mediums were not equivalent, our results demonstrate that colony size provides a sensitive means of measuring fitness that is particularly well suited to measurements across many environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2022
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