Related papers: Predictability of evolutionary trajectories in fit…

The fitness landscape metaphor plays a central role on the modeling of optimizing principles in many research fields, ranging from evolutionary biology, where it was first introduced, to management research. Here we consider the ensemble of…

Proteins evolve through complex sequence spaces, with fitness landscapes serving as a conceptual framework that links sequence to function. Fitness landscapes can be smooth, where multiple similarly accessible evolutionary paths are…

Random walks on multidimensional nonlinear landscapes are of interest in many areas of science and engineering. In particular, properties of adaptive trajectories on fitness landscapes determine population fates and thus play a central role…

Biological evolution can be conceptualized as a search process in the space of gene sequences guided by the fitness landscape, a mapping that assigns a measure of reproductive value to each genotype. Here we discuss probabilistic models of…

The energy landscapes of proteins have evolved to be different from most random heteropolymers. Many studies have concluded that evolutionary selection for rapid and reliable folding to a given structure that is stable at biological…

The tempo and mode of an adaptive process is strongly determined by the structure of the fitness landscape that underlies it. In order to be able to predict evolutionary outcomes (even on the short term), we must know more about the nature…

The understanding, and even the description of protein folding is impeded by the complexity of the process. Much of this complexity can be described and understood by taking a statistical approach to the energetics of protein conformation,…

The concept of fitness is introduced, and a simple derivation of the Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection (which states that the average fitness of a population increases if its variance is nonzero) is given. After a short discussion of…

The genotype-fitness map plays a fundamental role in shaping the dynamics of evolution. However, it is difficult to directly measure a fitness landscape in practice, because the number of possible genotypes is astronomical. One approach is…

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…

We study the geometric properties of the energy landscape of coarse-grained, off-lattice models of polymers by endowing the configuration space with a suitable metric, depending on the potential energy function, such that the dynamical…

Evolutionary adaptation is the process that increases the fit of a population to the fitness landscape it inhabits. As a consequence, evolutionary dynamics is shaped, constrained, and channeled, by that fitness landscape. Much work has been…

A central goal of protein-folding theory is to predict the stochastic dynamics of transition paths --- the rare trajectories that transit between the folded and unfolded ensembles --- using only thermodynamic information, such as a…

A geometric analysis of the global properties of the energy landscape of a minimalistic model of a polypeptide is presented, which is based on the relation between dynamical trajectories and geodesics of a suitable manifold, whose metric is…

A fitness landscape is a genetic space -- with two genotypes adjacent if they differ in a single locus -- and a fitness function. Evolutionary dynamics produce a flow on this landscape from lower fitness to higher; reaching equilibrium only…

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…

Proteins populate a manifold in the high-dimensional sequence space whose geometrical structure guides their natural evolution. Leveraging recently-developed structure prediction tools based on transformer models, we first examine the…

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…

In evolution theory the concept of a fitness landscape has played an important role, evolution itself being portrayed as a hill-climbing process on a rugged landscape. In this article it is shown that in general, in the presence of other…

Molecular evolution is often conceptualised as adaptive walks on rugged fitness landscapes, driven by mutations and constrained by incremental fitness selection. It is well known that epistasis shapes the ruggedness of the landscape's…