GELIFES Seminars - Meike Wortel

Meike Wortel (University of Amsterdam)

Evolution on deformable fitness landscapes

Implications for antibiotic resistance evolution

Fitness landscapes have become a central tool in evolutionary biology, linking genotype to fitness to predict evolutionary trajectories. Classical fitness landscapes assume each genotype has a fixed fitness, yet organisms routinely modify their environment — depleting resources, degrading toxins, or releasing public goods — making fitness frequency-dependent. The landscape is thus continuously deformed by the resident population as evolution proceeds. I will discuss a general eco-evolutionary framework for such deformable landscapes, in which evolutionary endpoints can be single-genotype optima or stable polymorphisms. We test this framework empirically using antibiotic resistance evolution mediated by β-lactamases, enzymes that degrade cephalosporins and thereby destroy the very antibiotic driving their selective advantage — creating strong eco-evolutionary feedback. Through head-to-head competitions, we show that β-lactamase mutants coexist or exclude depending on density and antibiotic concentration, and a mechanistic model reveals that eco-evolutionary feedback increases phenotypic diversity along evolutionary trajectories. Together, our results demonstrate that eco-evolutionary feedback fundamentally alters evolutionary dynamics in ways not captured by static fitness landscapes, underscoring the importance of incorporating environmental modification into evolutionary predictions.

Biosketch:
Meike Wortel is an Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam. Her research combines theoretical and computational modeling to understand microbial evolution and how metabolic interactions shape microbial communities, with applications in antibiotic resistance and human-associated microbiomes. She works closely with experimental collaborators to test model predictions and interpret observations. After a PhD in Systems Biology at VU University Amsterdam, she ventured into Evolutionary Biology with postdoctoral positions at the Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis in Oslo and the Origins Center — and now combines both at her Evo Sys Bio Lab.