Diminishing returns of inoculum size on the rate of a plant RNA virus evolution

[EN] Understanding how genetic drift, mutation and selection interplay in determining the evolutionary fate of populations is one of the central themes of Evolutionary Biology. Theory predicts that by increasing the number of coexisting beneficial alleles in a population beyond some point does not necessarily translates into an acceleration in the rate of evolution. This diminishing-returns effect of beneficial genetic variability in microbial asexual populations is known as clonal interference. Clonal interference has been shown to operate in experimental populations of animal RNA viruses replicating in cell cultures. Here we carried out experiments to test whether a similar diminishing-re…