The dynamics of adaptation on correlated fitness landscapes.

ABSTRACT: Evolutionary theory predicts that a population in a new environment will accumulate adaptive substitutions, but precisely how they accumulate is poorly understood. The dynamics of adaptation depend on the underlying fitness landscape. Virtually nothing is known about fitness landscapes in nature, and few methods allow us to infer the landscape from empirical data. With a view toward this inference problem, we have developed a theory that, in the weak-mutation limit, predicts how a population's mean fitness and the number of accumulated substitutions are expected to increase over time, depending on the underlying fitness landscape. We find that fitness and substitution trajectories depend not on the full distribution of fitness effects of available mutations but rather on the expected fixat

SUBMITTER: Kryazhimskiy S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2767361 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature