ABSTRACT
Dormancy is a common bet-hedging strategy that allows organisms to persist through biotic and abiotic conditions that are sub-optimal for growth and reproduction by reducing their metabolic activity. The ability to enter and exit a dormant state allows a population to maintain a reservoir of genetic and phenotypic diversity that can contribute to the long-term survival of the population (i.e., a seed bank), a potentially adaptive strategy has long been of interest to ecologists and evolutionary biologists. However, we know comparatively little about how dormancy influences the fundamental evolutionary forces of genetic drift, mutation, selection, recombination, and gene flow. Here, we discuss how seed banks affect the fundamental forces that underpin evolution by reviewing existing population genetic models, implementing novel simulations, and determining how and when dormancy can influence evolution as a population genetic process. Our simulations show that dormancy can only influence selection under certain demographic conditions, suggesting that the active portion of a population can continue to undergo adaptive evolution even in the presence of a large seed bank. We then extend our analysis to examine how seed banks can alter macroevolutionary dynamics and determine whether metabolically inactive microbial populations are engaging in dormancy as a life history strategy. We propose that by examining the population genetic and macroevolutionary implications of dormancy as a life history strategy we can understand the extant that seed banks influence microbial evolutionary dynamics.