The time scale of evolutionary innovation.

ABSTRACT: A fundamental question in biology is the following: what is the time scale that is needed for evolutionary innovations? There are many results that characterize single steps in terms of the fixation time of new mutants arising in populations of certain size and structure. But here we ask a different question, which is concerned with the much longer time scale of evolutionary trajectories: how long does it take for a population exploring a fitness landscape to find target sequences that encode new biological functions? Our key variable is the length, L, of the genetic sequence that undergoes adaptation. In computer science there is a crucial distinction between problems that require algorithms which take polynomial or exponential time. The latter are considered to be intractable. Here we de

SUBMITTER: Chatterjee K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4161296 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature