Evolution in alternating environments with tunable interlandscape correlations.

ABSTRACT: Natural populations are often exposed to temporally varying environments. Evolutionary dynamics in varying environments have been extensively studied, although understanding the effects of varying selection pressures remains challenging. Here, we investigate how cycling between a pair of statistically related fitness landscapes affects the evolved fitness of an asexually reproducing population. We construct pairs of fitness landscapes that share global fitness features but are correlated with one another in a tunable way, resulting in landscape pairs with specific correlations. We find that switching between these landscape pairs, depending on the ruggedness of the landscape and the interlandscape correlation, can either increase or decrease steady-state fitness relative to evolution in si

SUBMITTER: Maltas J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8246403 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature