ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
Fate of a mutation in a fluctuating environment.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 84 papers.
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Who cites it
84 citing papers in PubMed.
- Deconstructing empirical fitness seascapes across scales of granularity.G3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2026Article
- Dissecting Fluctuating Selection: A Unified Population and Quantitative Genetics Framework.Genome biology and evolution · 2026Article
- The bacterial march toward symbiosis: on-ramps and off-ramps.Trends in microbiology · 2026Review
- Environment-dependent epistasis shapes adaptation to fluctuating resources.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Competition constrains parasite adaptation to thermal heterogeneity.Evolution letters · 2026Article
- Fluctuating environment causes neoplastic transition and epithelial-mesenchymal plasticity in human cells.Research square · 2026Article
- Emergent frequency-dependent selection predicts mutation outcomes in complex ecological communities.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Genetic Footprints of Seasonal Fluctuating Selection: A Comparison With Established Selection Forms.Genome biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Evolutionary dynamics under phenotypic uncertainty.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Deconstructing empirical fitness seascapes across scales of granularity.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Exploring cooperation among social pathogens: a computational perspective.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2026Review
- Adaptive tracking with antagonistic pleiotropy results in seemingly neutral molecular evolution.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Deep mutational scans clarify the record of evolution.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Information and fitness in two-state systems: self-replicating individuals in a fluctuating environment.ArXiv · 2025Article
- Genome-level selection in tumors as a universal marker of resistance to therapy.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Trans-Specific Polymorphisms Between Cryptic Daphnia Species Affect Fitness and Behavior.Molecular ecology · 2025Article
- Free Will as Defined by the Constrained Disorder Principle: a Restricted, Mandatory, Personalized, Regulated Process for Decision-Making.Integrative psychological & behavioral science · 2024Review
- Estimating the proportion of beneficial mutations that are not adaptive in mammals.PLoS genetics · 2024Article
- Models of Fluctuating Selection Between Generations: A Solution for the Theoretical Inconsistency.Journal of molecular evolution · 2024Article
- Article
24 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Natural environments are never truly constant, but the evolutionary implications of temporally varying selection pressures remain poorly understood. Here we investigate how the fate of a new mutation in a fluctuating environment depends on the dynamics of environmental variation and on the selective pressures in each condition. We find that even when a mutation experiences many environmental epochs before fixing or going extinct, its fate is not necessarily determined by its time-averaged selective effect. Instead, environmental variability reduces the efficiency of selection across a broad parameter regime, rendering selection unable to distinguish between mutations that are substantially beneficial and substantially deleterious on average. Temporal fluctuations can also dramatically increase fixation probabilities, often making the details of these fluctuations more important than the average selection pressures acting on each new mutation. For example, mutations that result in a trade-off between conditions but are strongly deleterious on average can nevertheless be more likely to fix than mutations that are always neutral or beneficial. These effects can have important implications for patterns of molecular evolution in variable environments, and they suggest that it may often be difficult for populations to maintain specialist traits, even when their loss leads to a decline in time-averaged fitness.
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