Evidence map›Paper›PMID 24290990›Full record

ReviewCurrent opinion in genetics & development2013

Should evolutionary geneticists worry about higher-order epistasis?

Daniel M Weinreich, Yinghong Lan, C Scott Wylie, Robert B Heckendorn

Abstract readReview
In one paragraph

Review in Current opinion in genetics & development, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 183 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
183citing papers in PubMed
14.4field-weighted citation impact, top 1% of its field
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

183 citing papers in PubMed, 327 citations in OpenAlex.

  1. Article
  2. Epistasis: Just say no!The Journal of biological chemistry · 2026
    Review
  3. Article
  4. Review
  5. Maynard Smith's analogy, realized: Common ancestry constrains evolutionary percolation through protein space.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026
    Article
  6. Article
  7. Determinants of metal import and specificity in a bacterial transporter.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026
    Article
  8. Article
  9. Article
  10. Deconstructing empirical fitness seascapes across scales of granularity.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026
    Article
  11. Article
  12. Article
  13. Evolutionary cell biology comes of age.Journal of cell science · 2025
    Article
  14. Epistatic drift in protein evolution.Current opinion in genetics & development · 2025
    Review
  15. Article
  16. Inference and visualization of complex genotype-phenotype maps withbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025
    Article
  17. Article
  18. EarlybioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025
    Article
  19. Longitudinal sequencing reveals polygenic and epistatic nature of genomic response to selection.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025
    Article
  20. Article

123 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.

4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.

Daniel M WeinreichDepartment of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Center for Computational Molecular Biology, Brown University, Box G-W, Providence, RI 02912, USA. Electronic address: Daniel_Weinreich@Brown.edu.
Yinghong Lan
C Scott Wylie
Robert B Heckendorn
Brown University · USUniversity of Idaho · US

Funding

Developing and Testing a Novel Geometric Model of Protein AdaptationR01GM095728 · NIGMS · BROWN UNIVERSITY · PI WEINREICH, DANIEL MICHAEL · 2011 to 2015
$1.4M
NIGMS NIH HHS R01 GM095728NIGMS NIH HHS R01GM095728
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Natural selection drives evolving populations up the fitness landscape, the projection from nucleotide sequence space to organismal reproductive success. While it has long been appreciated that topographic complexities on fitness landscapes can arise only as a consequence of epistatic interactions between mutations, evolutionary genetics has mainly focused on epistasis between pairs of mutations. Here we propose a generalization to the classical population genetic treatment of pairwise epistasis that yields expressions for epistasis among arbitrary subsets of mutations of all orders (pairwise, three-way, etc.). Our approach reveals substantial higher-order epistasis in almost every published fitness landscape. Furthermore we demonstrate that higher-order epistasis is critically important in two systems we know best. We conclude that higher-order epistasis deserves empirical and theoretical attention from evolutionary geneticists.

Indexed as

Epistasis, GeneticEvolution, MolecularModels, GeneticAnimalsEscherichia coliFungiGenetic FitnessGenetics, PopulationMutationSelection, Genetic

Identifiers

PMID24290990
PMCPMC4313208
OpenAlexW2073171022

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceTDM
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.