The dynamics of adaptation determines which mutations fix in a population, and hence how reproducible evolution will be. This is central to understanding the spectra of mutations recovered in evolution of antibiotic resistance1, the response of pathogens to immune selection2,3, and the dynamics of cancer progression4,5. In laboratory evolution experiments, demonstrably beneficial mutations are found repeatedly6–8, but are often accompanied by other mutations with no obvious benefit. Here we use whole-genome whole-population sequencing to examine the dynamics of genome sequence evolution at high temporal resolution in 40 replicate Saccharomyces cerevisiae populations growing in rich medium for 1,000 generations. We find pervasive genetic hitchhiking: multiple mutations arise and move synchronously through the population as mutational “cohorts.” Multiple clonal cohorts are often present simultaneously, competing with each other in the same population. Our results show that patterns of sequence evolution are driven by a balance between these chance effects of hitchhiking and interference, which increase stochastic variation in evolutionary outcomes, and the deterministic action of selection on individual mutations, which favors parallel evolutionary solutions in replicate populations.

Epistatic interactions between mutations can make evolutionary trajectories contingent on the chance occurrence of initial mutations. We used experimental evolution in Saccharomyces cerevisiae to quantify this contingency, finding differences in adaptability between 64 closely related genotypes. Despite these differences, sequencing of 104 evolved clones showed that initial genotype did not constrain future mutational trajectories. Instead, reconstructed combinations of mutations revealed a pattern of diminishing returns epistasis: beneficial mutations have consistently smaller effects in fitter backgrounds. Taken together, these results show that beneficial mutations affecting a variety of biological processes are globally coupled: they interact strongly, but only through their combined effect on fitness. As a consequence, fitness evolution follows a predictable trajectory even though sequence-level adaptation is stochastic.

Sex and recombination are pervasive throughout nature despite their substantial costs1. Understanding the evolutionary forces that maintain these phenomena is a central challenge in biology2,3. One longstanding hypothesis argues that sex is beneficial because recombination speeds adaptation4. Theory has proposed a number of distinct population genetic mechanisms that could underlie this advantage. For example, sex can promote the fixation of beneficial mutations either by alleviating interference competition (the Fisher-Muller effect)5,6 or by separating them from deleterious load (the ruby in the rubbish effect)7,8. Previous experiments confirm that sex can increase the rate of adaptation9–17, but these studies did not observe the evolutionary dynamics that drive this effect at the genomic level. Here, we present the first comparison between the sequence-level dynamics of adaptation in experimental sexual and asexual populations, which allows us to identify the specific mechanisms by which sex speeds adaptation. We find that sex alters the molecular signatures of evolution by changing the spectrum of mutations that fix, and confirm theoretical predictions that it does so by alleviating clonal interference. We also show that substantially deleterious mutations hitchhike to fixation in adapting asexual populations. In contrast, recombination prevents such mutations from fixing. Our results demonstrate that sex both speeds adaptation and alters its molecular signature by allowing natural selection to more efficiently sort beneficial from deleterious mutations.