Weinreich Daniel M
Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
Genetics. 2005 Nov;171(3):1397-405. doi: 10.1534/genetics.104.036830. Epub 2005 Aug 3.
Sewall Wright's genotypic fitness landscape makes explicit one mechanism by which epistasis for fitness can constrain evolution by natural selection. Wright distinguished between landscapes possessing multiple fitness peaks and those with only a single peak and emphasized that the former class imposes substantially greater constraint on natural selection. Here I present novel formalism that more finely partitions the universe of possible fitness landscapes on the basis of the rank ordering of their genotypic fitness values. In this report I focus on fitness landscapes lacking sign epistasis (i.e., landscapes that lack mutations the sign of whose fitness effect varies epistatically), which constitute a subset of Wright's single peaked landscapes. More than one fitness rank ordering lacking sign epistasis exists for L > 2 (where L is the number of interacting loci), and I find that a highly statistically significant effect exists between landscape membership in fitness rank-ordering partition and two different proxies for genetic constraint, even within this subset of landscapes. This statistical association is robust to population size, permitting general inferences about some of the characteristics of fitness rank orderings responsible for genetic constraint on natural selection.
休厄尔·赖特的基因型适合度景观明确了一种机制,通过这种机制,适合度的上位性可以通过自然选择来限制进化。赖特区分了具有多个适合度峰值的景观和只有一个峰值的景观,并强调前者对自然选择施加的限制要大得多。在这里,我提出了一种新颖的形式体系,它基于基因型适合度值的排序,更精细地划分了可能的适合度景观的范围。在本报告中,我关注缺乏符号上位性的适合度景观(即缺乏其适合度效应的符号会因上位性而变化的突变的景观),这构成了赖特单峰景观的一个子集。对于L>2(其中L是相互作用位点的数量),存在不止一种缺乏符号上位性的适合度排序,并且我发现,即使在这个景观子集中,适合度排序分区中的景观成员身份与两种不同的遗传限制代理之间也存在高度统计学显著的效应。这种统计关联对种群大小具有鲁棒性,从而可以对负责自然选择遗传限制的适合度排序的一些特征进行一般推断。