RT Journal Article
T1 Adaptive multiscapes: an up-to-date metaphor to visualize molecular adaptation
A1 Catalan, Pablo
A1 Fernández Arias, Clemente
A1 Cuesta, José A.
A1 Manrubia, Susanna
AB Wright's metaphor of the fitness landscape has shaped and conditioned our view of the adaptation of populations for almost a century. Since its inception, and including criticism raised by Wright himself, the concept has been surrounded by controversy. Among others, the debate stems from the intrinsic difficulty to capture important features of the space of genotypes, such as its high dimensionality or the existence of abundant ridges, in a visually appealing two-dimensional picture. Two additional currently widespread observations come to further constrain the applicability of the original metaphor: the very skewed distribution of phenotype sizes (which may actively prevent, due to entropic effects, the achievement of fitness maxima), and functional promiscuity (i.e. the existence of secondary functions which entail partial adaptation to environments never encountered before by the population). Results: Here we revise some of the shortcomings of the fitness landscape metaphor and propose a new "scape" formed by interconnected layers, each layer containing the phenotypes viable in a given environment. Different phenotypes within a layer are accessible through mutations with selective value, while neutral mutations cause displacements of populations within a phenotype. A different environment is represented as a separated layer, where phenotypes may have new fitness values, other phenotypes may be viable, and the same genotype may yield a different phenotype, representing genotypic promiscuity. This scenario explicitly includes the many-to-many structure of the genotype-to-phenotype map. A number of empirical observations regarding the adaptation of populations in the light of adaptive multiscapes are reviewed. Conclusions: Several shortcomings of Wright's visualization of fitness landscapes can be overcome through adaptive multiscapes.
PB BioMed Central
SN 1745-6150
YR 2017
FD 2017-02-28
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10016/28590
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10016/28590
LA eng
NO This work was supported by the Spanish projects ViralESS (FIS2014-57686-P, MINECO) and FIS2015-64349-P (MINECO/FEDER, UE). The funding body did not have any role in the design of the study and collection, analysis, and interpretation of data, and did not contribute to writing the manuscript.
DS e-Archivo
RD 27 jul. 2024