Related papers: Dynamic Epistasis under Varying Environmental Pert…
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…
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 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…
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…
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 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…
In evolution, the effects of a single deleterious mutation can sometimes be compensated for by a second mutation which recovers the original phenotype. Such epistatic interactions have implications for the structure of genome space -…
Living systems evolve one mutation at a time, but a single mutation can alter the effect of subsequent mutations. The underlying mechanistic determinants of such epistasis are unclear. Here, we demonstrate that the physical dynamics of a…
In epistatic fitness landscapes, the fitness effect of a mutation depends on the genetic background and may even switch between deleterious and beneficial depending on the presence of another mutation. Epistatic interactions may cause both…
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…
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…
Biochemical and regulatory interactions central to biological networks are expected to cause extensive genetic interactions or epistasis affecting the heritability of complex traits and the distribution of genotypes in populations. However,…
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 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…
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…
An important question in molecular evolution is whether an amino acid that occurs at a given position makes an independent contribution to fitness, or whether its effect depends on the state of other loci in the organism's genome, a…
Cells use genetic switches to shift between alternate stable gene expression states, e.g., to adapt to new environments or to follow a developmental pathway. Conceptually, these stable phenotypes can be considered as attractive states on an…
In higher organisms, all cells share the same genome, but every cell expresses only a limited and specific set of genes that defines the cell type. During cell division, not only the genome, but also the cell type is inherited by the…
Cells often exhibit different and stable phenotypes from the same DNA sequence. Robustness and plasticity of such cellular states are controlled by diverse transcriptional and epigenetic mechanisms, among them the modification of…
Every now and then the cultural paradigm of a society changes. Human history can be regarded as a sequence of long periods of cultural stasis punctuated by paradigm shifts that transform culture upside-down over the turn of a few…