Evolutionary Innovation by Polyploidy

The preferred conditions for evolutionary innovation is a fundamental question, but little is known, in part because the question involves rare events. We focused on the potential role of polyploidy in the evolution of novel traits. There are two hypotheses regarding the effects of polyploidy on evolution: Polyploidy reduces the effect of a single mutation and slows evolution. In contrast, the gene redundancy introduced by polyploidy will promote neofunctionalization and accelerate evolution. Does polyploidy speed up or slow down evolution? In this study, we proposed a simple model of polyploid cells and showed that the evolutionary rate of polyploids is similar to or much slower than that of haploids under neutral selection or during gradual evolution. However, on a fitness landscape where cells should jump over a lethal valley to increase their fitness, the probability of evolution in polyploidy could be drastically increased, and the optimal number of chromosomes was identified. We theoretically discussed the existence of this optimal chromosome numbers from the large deviation theory. Furthermore, we proposed that the optimization for achieving evolutionary innovation could determine the range of chromosome number in polyploid bacteria.