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A Family of Fitness Landscapes Modeled through Gene Regulatory Networks
Authors:Chia-Hung Yang  Samuel V. Scarpino
Affiliation:1.Network Science Institute, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115, USA;2.Physics Department, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115, USA;3.Roux Institute, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115, USA;4.Institute for Experiential AI, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115, USA;5.Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA;6.Vermont Complex Systems Center, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT 05405, USA
Abstract:
Fitness landscapes are a powerful metaphor for understanding the evolution of biological systems. These landscapes describe how genotypes are connected to each other through mutation and related through fitness. Empirical studies of fitness landscapes have increasingly revealed conserved topographical features across diverse taxa, e.g., the accessibility of genotypes and “ruggedness”. As a result, theoretical studies are needed to investigate how evolution proceeds on fitness landscapes with such conserved features. Here, we develop and study a model of evolution on fitness landscapes using the lens of Gene Regulatory Networks (GRNs), where the regulatory products are computed from multiple genes and collectively treated as phenotypes. With the assumption that regulation is a binary process, we prove the existence of empirically observed, topographical features such as accessibility and connectivity. We further show that these results hold across arbitrary fitness functions and that a trade-off between accessibility and ruggedness need not exist. Then, using graph theory and a coarse-graining approach, we deduce a mesoscopic structure underlying GRN fitness landscapes where the information necessary to predict a population’s evolutionary trajectory is retained with minimal complexity. Using this coarse-graining, we develop a bottom-up algorithm to construct such mesoscopic backbones, which does not require computing the genotype network and is therefore far more efficient than brute-force approaches. Altogether, this work provides mathematical results of high-dimensional fitness landscapes and a path toward connecting theory to empirical studies.
Keywords:fitness landscapes   gene regulatory networks   coarse-graining   biological computation   graph theory
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