Evolutionary rescue: Is a greater challenge always worse?

Hildegard UECKER
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Munich, Germany uecker@evolbio.mpg.de
 

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If environmental conditions change, populations might become maladapted and be at risk of extinction. How likely is it that timely adaptive evolution rescues a population from going extinct? Intuitively, population recovery seems more likely if the environmental change is mild and population decline slow. Using theoretical models, we identify genetic and environmental conditions under which this simple picture changes and counter-intuitively, a harsh change may enhance population survival.

In the context of drug resistance, the severity of change is set by the drug dose, which can be modulated to influence the evolutionary dynamics. Current studies focus on the effect of drug dosing at the probability of resistance evolution within any one patient. However, for infectious diseases, it is equally important to minimize transmission of resistance in the community. By jointly considering the within-host and between-host dynamics, we show that there can be trade-offs between mitigating the risk of resistance at the individual and the population levels.

Recent publications:

Sciré J.,  Hozé N.*, Uecker, H.* (submitted) Aggressive or moderate drug therapy for infectious diseases? Trade-offs between different treatment goals at the individual and population levels.   *equal contribution

Uecker H. 2017. Evolutionary rescue in randomly mating, selfing, and clonal populations. Evolution 71:845–858.

Uecker H. and Hermisson J. 2016. The role of recombination in evolutionary rescue. Genetics 202: 1-12.