Analysis of Bacterial Laboratory Evolution toward Prediction, Control, and Macroscopic State Theory of Evolution

During adaptive evolution, phenotype and genotype dynamically change; however, the relationship between these changes and associated constraints is yet to be fully elucidated. In this review, we focus on the analysis of phenotypic and genotypic changes occurred in Escherichia coli cells during laboratory evolution experiments. We demonstrated that the change of fitness can be quantitatively predicted by the expression changes of a small number of genes, suggesting that phenotypic changes in adaptive evolution are constrained on relatively low-dimensional dynamics. The automated system for laboratory evolution is also presented, which enables us to achieve large-scale data in bacterial adaptive evolution.