1202.4378 (Ivan G. Szendro et al.)

Quantitative analyses of empirical fitness landscapes    [PDF]

Ivan G. Szendro, Martijn F. Schenk, Jasper Franke, Joachim Krug, J. Arjan G. M. de Visser

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 was lacking, but since it became feasible to construct all possible
genotypes containing combinations of a limited set of mutations, the number of
studies has grown to a point where a classification of landscapes becomes
possible. The aim of this review is to identify measures of epistasis that
allow a meaningful comparison of fitness landscapes and then apply them to the
empirical landscapes to discern factors that affect ruggedness. The various
measures of epistasis that have been proposed in the literature appear to be
equivalent. Our comparsion shows that the ruggedness of the empirical landscape
is affected by whether the included mutations are beneficial or deleterious and
by whether intra- or intergenic epistasis is involved. Finally, the empirical
landscapes are compared to landscapes generated with the Rough Mt. Fuji model.
Despite the simplicity of this model, it captures the features of the
experimental landscapes remarkably well.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.4378