Related papers: Entropic contribution to phenotype fitness

One of the most intriguing questions in evolution is how organisms exhibit suitable phenotypic variation to rapidly adapt in novel selective environments which is crucial for evolvability. Recent work showed that when selective environments…

A fitness landscape is a mapping from the space of genetic sequences, which is modeled here as a binary hypercube of dimension $L$, to the real numbers. We consider random models of fitness landscapes, where fitness values are assigned…

Growing efforts to measure fitness landscapes in molecular and microbial systems are premised on a tight relationship between landscape topography and evolutionary trajectories. This relationship, however, is far from being straightforward:…

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…

Many biological systems regulate phenotypic heterogeneity as a fitness-maximising strategy in uncertain and dynamic environments. Analysis of such strategies is typically confined both to a discrete set of environmental conditions, and to a…

The factors that influence genetic architecture shape the structure of the fitness landscape, and therefore play a large role in the evolutionary dynamics. Here the NK model is used to investigate how epistasis and pleiotropy -- key…

The ability of organisms to accurately sense their environment and respond accordingly is critical for evolutionary success. However, exactly how the sensory ability influences fitness is a topic of active research, while the necessity of a…

The population is composed of individuals characterised by their genetic strings, phenotypes and ages. We discuss the influence of probabilities of survival of the individuals on the dynamics and phenotypic variability of the population. We…

Evolution in changing environments is an important, but little studied aspect of the theory of evolution. The idea of adaptive walks in fitness landscapes has triggered a vast amount of research and has led to many important insights about…

Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…

In this paper we study a class of stochastic individual-based models that describe the evolution of haploid populations where each individual is characterised by a phenotype and a genotype. The phenotype of an individual determines its…

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…

We consider a fixed size population that undergoes an evolutionary adaptation in the weak mutuation rate limit, which we model as a biased Langevin process in the genotype space. We show analytically and numerically that, if the fitness…

We study metanetworks arising in genotype and phenotype spaces, in the context of a model population of Boolean graphs evolved under selection for short dynamical attractors. We define the adjacency matrix of a graph as its genotype, which…

Organismal phenotypes emerge from a complex set of genotypic interactions. While technological advances in sequencing provide a quantitative description of an organism's genotype, characterization of an organism's physical phenotype lags…

Phylogenetic analyses of gene expression have great potential for addressing a wide range of questions. These analyses will, for example, identify genes that have evolutionary shifts in expression that are correlated with evolutionary…

Evolutionary dynamics can be studied in well-mixed or structured populations. Population structure typically arises from the heterogeneous distribution of individuals in physical space or on social networks. Here we introduce a new type of…

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…

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…

Why evolvability appears to have increased over evolutionary time is an important unresolved biological question. Unlike most candidate explanations, this paper proposes that increasing evolvability can result without any pressure to adapt.…