ArticlePLoS genetics2013
The environment affects epistatic interactions to alter the topology of an empirical fitness landscape.
Article in PLoS genetics, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 62 papers.
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Who cites it
62 citing papers in PubMed, 138 citations in OpenAlex.
- Deconstructing empirical fitness seascapes across scales of granularity.G3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2026Article
- Inference of fitness landscapes with heterogeneous patterns of epistasis across sites.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Deconstructing empirical fitness seascapes across scales of granularity.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Inference and Visualization of Complex Genotype-Phenotype Maps.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Microbial interactions in facilitating antibiotic activity and resistance evolution.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2026Review
- Environment-by-Environment Interactions Differ Across Genetic Backgrounds.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Compensatory evolution to DNA replication stress is robust to nutrient availability.Molecular systems biology · 2025Article
- Inference and visualization of complex genotype-phenotype maps withbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Taylor's Power Law rules the dynamics of allele frequencies during viral evolution in response to host changes.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- History shapes regulatory and evolutionary responses to tigecycline in two reference strains ofMicrobiology (Reading, England) · 2025Article
- History shapes regulatory and evolutionary responses to tigecycline in strains ofbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Distinguishing among evolutionary and ecological processes shaping microbiome dynamics.The ISME journal · 2025Review
- Data-driven discovery of the interplay between genetic and environmental factors in bacterial growth.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Patterns of Fitness and Gene Expression Epistasis Generated by Beneficial Mutations in the rho and rpoB Genes of Escherichia coli during High-Temperature Adaptation.Molecular biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Unpredictability of the Fitness Effects of Antimicrobial Resistance Mutations Across Environments in Escherichia coli.Molecular biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Competition-driven eco-evolutionary feedback reshapes bacteriophage lambda's fitness landscape and enables speciation.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Environmental modulation of global epistasis in a drug resistance fitness landscape.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Have you tried turning it off and on again? Oscillating selection to enhance fitness-landscape traversal in adaptive laboratory evolution experiments.Metabolic engineering communications · 2023Review
- Evolutionary "Crowdsourcing": Alignment of Fitness Landscapes Allows for Cross-species Adaptation of a Horizontally Transferred Gene.Molecular biology and evolution · 2023Article
- Epistasis and evolution: recent advances and an outlook for prediction.BMC biology · 2023Review
2 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The fitness effect of mutations can be influenced by their interactions with the environment, other mutations, or both. Previously, we constructed 32 ( = 2⁵) genotypes that comprise all possible combinations of the first five beneficial mutations to fix in a laboratory-evolved population of Escherichia coli. We found that (i) all five mutations were beneficial for the background on which they occurred; (ii) interactions between mutations drove a diminishing returns type epistasis, whereby epistasis became increasingly antagonistic as the expected fitness of a genotype increased; and (iii) the adaptive landscape revealed by the mutation combinations was smooth, having a single global fitness peak. Here we examine how the environment influences epistasis by determining the interactions between the same mutations in two alternative environments, selected from among 1,920 screened environments, that produced the largest increase or decrease in fitness of the most derived genotype. Some general features of the interactions were consistent: mutations tended to remain beneficial and the overall pattern of epistasis was of diminishing returns. Other features depended on the environment; in particular, several mutations were deleterious when added to specific genotypes, indicating the presence of antagonistic interactions that were absent in the original selection environment. Antagonism was not caused by consistent pleiotropic effects of individual mutations but rather by changing interactions between mutations. Our results demonstrate that understanding adaptation in changing environments will require consideration of the combined effect of epistasis and pleiotropy across environments.
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