Detecting epistasis from an ensemble of adapting populations.

ABSTRACT: The role that epistasis plays during adaptation remains an outstanding problem, which has received considerable attention in recent years. Most of the recent empirical studies are based on ensembles of replicate populations that adapt in a fixed, laboratory controlled condition. Researchers often seek to infer the presence and form of epistasis in the fitness landscape from the time evolution of various statistics averaged across the ensemble of populations. Here, we provide a rigorous analysis of what quantities, drawn from time series of such ensembles, can be used to infer epistasis for populations evolving under weak mutation on finite-site fitness landscapes. First, we analyze the mean fitness trajectory-that is, the time course of the ensemble average fitness. We show that for any ep

SUBMITTER: McCandlish DM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5656054 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature