The Selection Of A Diverse Population Of P. Fluorescens

The selection of a diverse population of P. fluorescens can be accounted best by originating from a common ancestor than from a complex web. Under ideal conditions, cellular transformation can provide new traits, perhaps offering a higher fitness, but such occurrences lacked consistency and were insignificant to the frequency of mutations in heterogeneous microcosms. Thus adaptive radiation is the driving force of the differential fitness between populations. The research goal was to test whether P. fluorescens phenotypes that could more easily pick up extracellular DNA will be conferred with higher fitness. Prokaryotic evolution has been shaped by transformation, as the environment is a host to a variety of extracellular DNA that is replenished by organisms as quickly as it’s degraded, provided that the trait offers a fitness advantage that allows for conjugation between bacteria (Levy-Booth et al., 2007). If such were the case in the microcosms, there would be a phenotype that was able to intake plasmids at a higher rate and had higher relative fitness values; however, besides for an occasional anomaly in data, there was insignificant intake of DNA across all phenotypes. Cellular competency cannot account for the observed traits in phenotypes as well. A phenotype that had the ability to incorporate genes should have higher fitness in both niches, thus having higher fitness regardless of the frequency dependency or previous niche specialization. The fitness assay results