The effect of mutational robustness on the evolvability of multicellular organisms and eukaryotic cells.

ABSTRACT: Canalization involves mutational robustness, the lack of phenotypic change as a result of genetic mutations. Given the large divergence in phenotype across species, understanding the relationship between high robustness and evolvability has been of interest to both theorists and experimentalists. Although canalization was originally proposed in the context of multicellular organisms, the effect of multicellularity and other classes of hierarchical organization on evolvability has not been considered by theoreticians. We address this issue using a Boolean population model with explicit representation of an environment in which individuals with explicit genotype and a hierarchical phenotype representing multicellularity evolve. Robustness is described by a single real number between zero and

SUBMITTER: Jiang P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10315174 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature