Resolving discrepancies between chimeric and multiplicative measures of higher-order epistasis.

ABSTRACT: Epistasis - the interaction between alleles at different genetic loci - plays a fundamental role in biology. However, several recent approaches quantify epistasis using a chimeric formula that measures deviations from a multiplicative fitness model on an additive scale, thus mixing two scales. Here, we show that for pairwise interactions, the chimeric formula yields a different magnitude but the same sign of epistasis compared to the multiplicative formula that measures both fitness and deviations on a multiplicative scale. However, for higher-order interactions, we show that the chimeric formula can have both different magnitude and sign compared to the multiplicative formula. We resolve these inconsistencies by deriving mathematical relationships between the different epistasis formulae

SUBMITTER: Chitra U 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11833126 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature