Low-Dimensional Organization of Metabolic Phenotypes Underlies Recurrent Evolutionary Diversification

Growth-rate profiles of natural Escherichia coli isolates across 32 carbon sources vary independently of lineage yet align with recurrent modular patterns linked to flux-based metabolic similarity.

• Why it matters: Carbon-source diversification often looks idiosyncratic and shows weak correspondence to phylogeny or simple gene content, leaving the structure of metabolic variation unclear.
• What they did: The study measured quantitative growth phenotypes across 32 carbon sources in natural isolates, compared them to de novo laboratory evolution diversification, and used reaction-level metabolic similarity to define flux-based relationships.
• The result: Modular, low-dimensional variance structure in growth-rate variation re-emerged during de novo evolution, collapsing natural and experimental datasets onto a shared structure and implying parallel diversification across contexts.

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