ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
On the feasibility of saltational evolution.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Stringent selection drives convergence toward omicron-like SARS-CoV-2 receptor-binding motifs.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Stochastic phenotypic switching arises in response to directional selection in experimentally evolved multicellular yeast.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Structural Enzymology, Phylogenetics, Differentiation, and Symbolic Reflexivity at the Dawn of Biology.Genome biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Evolution is coupled with branching across many granularities of life.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Evolution and host-specific adaptation ofScience (New York, N.Y.) · 2024Article
- Leaky barriers to gene sharing between locally co-existing coagulase-negative Staphylococcus species.Communications biology · 2023Article
- A Selective Bottleneck During Host Entry Drives the Evolution of New Legume Symbionts.Molecular biology and evolution · 2023Article
- Molecular patterns and processes in evolving sociality: lessons from insects.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Host heterogeneity and epistasis explain punctuated evolution of SARS-CoV-2.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Immune Heterogeneity and Epistasis Explain Punctuated Evolution of SARS-CoV-2.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2022Article
- Article
- Thermodynamics of evolution and the origin of life.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Evolution in the weak-mutation limit: Stasis periods punctuated by fast transitions between saddle points on the fitness landscape.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Review
- Substitutions Are Boring: Some Arguments about Parallel Mutations and High Mutation Rates.Trends in genetics : TIG · 2019Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Is evolution always gradual or can it make leaps? We examine a mathematical model of an evolutionary process on a fitness landscape and obtain analytic solutions for the probability of multimutation leaps, that is, several mutations occurring simultaneously, within a single generation in 1 genome, and being fixed all together in the evolving population. The results indicate that, for typical, empirically observed combinations of the parameters of the evolutionary process, namely, effective population size, mutation rate, and distribution of selection coefficients of mutations, the probability of a multimutation leap is low, and accordingly the contribution of such leaps is minor at best. However, we show that, taking sign epistasis into account, leaps could become an important factor of evolution in cases of substantially elevated mutation rates, such as stress-induced mutagenesis in microbes. We hypothesize that stress-induced mutagenesis is an evolvable adaptive strategy.
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