Related papers: Robustness and epistasis in mutation-selection mod…
The concept of a fitness landscape is a powerful metaphor that offers insight into various aspects of evolutionary processes and guidance for the study of evolution. Until recently, empirical evidence on the ruggedness of these landscapes…
Genotypic fitness landscapes are constructed by assessing the fitness of all possible combinations of a given number of mutations. In the last years, several experimental fitness landscapes have been completely resolved. As fitness…
Epistatic interactions between mutations add substantial complexity to adaptive landscapes, and are often thought of as detrimental to our ability to predict evolution. Yet, patterns of global epistasis, in which the fitness effect of a…
Mutational robustness quantifies the effect of random mutations on fitness. When mutational robustness is high, most mutations do not change fitness or have only a minor effect on it. From the point of view of fitness landscapes, robust…
Epistasis occurs when the effect of a mutation depends on its carrier's genetic background. Despite increasing evidence that epistasis for fitness is common, its role during evolution is contentious. Fitness landscapes, mappings of genotype…
The fitness landscape defines the relationship between genotypes and fitness in a given environment, and underlies fundamental quantities such as the distribution of selection coefficient, or the magnitude and type of epistasis. A better…
This is an introductory review of deterministic mutation-selection models for asexual populations (i.e., quasispecies theory) and related topics. First, the basic concepts of fitness, mutations, and sequence space are introduced. Different…
A common view in evolutionary biology is that mutation rates are minimised. However, studies in combinatorial optimisation and search have shown a clear advantage of using variable mutation rates as a control parameter to optimise the…
The fitness landscape - the mapping between genotypes and fitness - determines properties of the process of adaptation. Several small genetic fitness landscapes have recently been built by selecting a handful of beneficial mutations and…
The fitness contribution of an allele at one genetic site may depend on alleles at other sites, a phenomenon known as epistasis. Epistasis can profoundly influence the process of evolution in populations under selection, and can shape the…
In this Letter, we extend the semiconservative quasispecies equations to incorporate imperfect DNA lesion repair. We study the equilibrium behavior of this model in the limit of infinite sequence length and population size, using a…
The class of epistatic fitness landscapes is much more diverse than the class of non-epistatic landscapes, and so it stands to reason that there exist dynamical phenomena that can only be realized in the presence of epistasis. Here, we…
Genetic interactions can strongly influence the fitness effects of individual mutations, yet the impact of these epistatic interactions on evolutionary dynamics remains poorly understood. Here we investigate the evolutionary role of…
We consider a population evolving due to mutation, selection and recombination, where selection includes single-locus terms (additive fitness) and two-loci terms (pairwise epistatic fitness). We further consider the problem of inferring…
Fisher's geometric model was originally introduced to argue that complex adaptations must occur in small steps because of pleiotropic constraints. When supplemented with the assumption of additivity of mutational effects on phenotypic…
Fitness landscapes are a useful concept to study the dynamics of meta-heuristics. In the last two decades, they have been applied with success to estimate the optimization power of several types of evolutionary algorithms, including genetic…
These notes introduce probabilistic landscape models defined on high-dimensional discrete sequence spaces. The models are motivated primarily by fitness landscapes in evolutionary biology, but links to statistical physics and computer…
We analyze the long-term stability of a stochastic model designed to illustrate the adaptation of a population to variation in its environment. A piecewise-deterministic process modeling adaptation is coupled to a Feller logistic diffusion…
Evolution on neutral networks of genotypes has been found in models to concentrate on genotypes with high mutational robustness, to a degree determined by the topology of the network. Here analysis is generalized beyond neutral networks to…
We suggest a natural approach that leads to a modification of classical quasispecies models and incorporates the possibility of population extinction in addition to growth. The resulting modified models are called open. Their essential…