Related papers: Competition between recombination and epistasis ca…
The contribution to an organism's phenotype from one genetic locus may depend upon the status of other loci. Such epistatic interactions among loci are now recognized as fundamental to shaping the process of adaptation in evolving…
Epistasis refers to the phenomenon in which phenotypic consequences caused by mutation of one gene depend on one or more mutations at another gene. Epistasis is critical for understanding many genetic and evolutionary processes, including…
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…
Large populations may contain numerous simultaneously segregating polymorphisms subject to natural selection. Since selection acts on individuals whose fitness depends on many loci, different loci affect each other's dynamics. This leads to…
Genetic diversity is central to the process of evolution. Both natural selection and random genetic drift are influenced by the level of genetic diversity of a population; selection acts on diversity while drift samples from it. At a given…
Evolutionary adaptation is often likened to climbing a hill or peak. While this process is simple for fitness landscapes where mutations are independent, the interaction between mutations (epistasis) as well as mutations at loci that affect…
Although many phenotypic traits are determined by a large number of genetic variants, the behavior of allele frequencies in a polygenic trait is not completely understood. The problem is especially challenging when the quantitative trait of…
Positive selection distorts the structure of genealogies and hence alters patterns of genetic variation within a population. Most analyses of these distortions focus on the signatures of hitchhiking due to hard or soft selective sweeps at a…
In sexual populations, selection operates neither on the whole genome, which is repeatedly taken apart and reassembled by recombination, nor on individual alleles that are tightly linked to the chromosomal neighborhood. The resulting…
Epistasis describes the phenomenon that mutations at different loci do not have independent effects with regard to certain phenotypes. Understanding the global epistatic landscape is vital for many genetic and evolutionary theories. Current…
Dominance is usually considered a constant value that describes the relative difference in fitness or phenotype between heterozygotes and the average of homozygotes at a focal polymorphic locus. However, the observed dominance can vary with…
Between-species coevolution, and in particular antagonistic host-parasite coevolution, is a major process shaping within-species diversity. In this paper we investigate the role of various stochastic processes affecting the outcome of the…
Fitness landscapes provide a quantitative framework for understanding how natural selection shapes evolutionary trajectories. A central feature of these landscapes is their number of local optima, which determines whether fitness-increasing…
Genetic interactions pervade every aspect of biology, from evolutionary theory where they determine the accessibility of evolutionary paths, to medicine where they contribute to complex genetic diseases. Until very recently, studies on…
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…
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…
The evolutionary effect of recombination depends crucially on the epistatic interactions between linked loci. A paradigmatic case where recombination is known to be strongly disadvantageous is a two-locus fitness landscape dis- playing…
The relationship between the shape of a fitness landscape and the underlying gene interactions, or epistasis, has been extensively studied in the two-locus case. Gene interactions among multiple loci are usually reduced to two-way…
We investigate the relationship between the average fitness decay due to single mutations and the strength of epistatic interactions in genetic sequences. We observe that epistatic interactions between mutations are correlated to the…
Epistatic interactions between residues determine a protein's adaptability and shape its evolutionary trajectory. When a protein experiences a changed environment, it is under strong selection to find a peak in the new fitness landscape. It…