ArticlePLoS biology2022
Strong evidence for the adaptive walk model of gene evolution in Drosophila and Arabidopsis.
Article in PLoS biology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- Gene-level complexity explains genome-wide variation in the distribution of fitness effects.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Reverse genetics of sexual antagonism.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- A century of theories of balancing selection.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Recurrent innovation of protein-protein interactions in the Drosophila piRNA pathway.The EMBO journal · 2026Article
- Seasonal Influenza Viruses Show Distinct Adaptive Dynamics During Growth in Chicken Eggs.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- In silico prediction of variant effects: promises and limitations for precision plant breeding.TAG. Theoretical and applied genetics. Theoretische und angewandte Genetik · 2025Review
- Limitations of sequence dissimilarity as a predictor of prokaryotic lineage.Open biology · 2025Review
- Functional innovation through new genes as a general evolutionary process.Nature genetics · 2025Review
- Repeated global adaptation across plant species.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Adaptation in human immune cells residing in tissues at the frontline of infections.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Reconciling theories of dominance with the relative rates of adaptive substitution on sex chromosomes and autosomes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Pangenomes of human gut microbiota uncover links between genetic diversity and stress response.Cell host & microbe · 2024Article
- Evolution is not driven by and toward increasing information and complexity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- fastDFE: Fast and Flexible Inference of the Distribution of Fitness Effects.Molecular biology and evolution · 2024Article
- An efficient and robust ABC approach to infer the rate and strength of adaptation.G3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2024Article
- oggmap: a Python package to extract gene ages per orthogroup and link them with single-cell RNA data.Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) · 2023Article
- Weaker selection on genes with treatment-specific expression consistent with a limit on plasticity evolution in Arabidopsis thaliana.Genetics · 2023Article
- Evolutionary Trajectories of New Duplicated and Putative De Novo Genes.Molecular biology and evolution · 2023Article
- Uncovering gene-family founder events during major evolutionary transitions in animals, plants and fungi using GenEra.Genome biology · 2023Article
- Next-generation development and application of codon model in evolution.Frontiers in genetics · 2023Review
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
Understanding the dynamics of species adaptation to their environments has long been a central focus of the study of evolution. Theories of adaptation propose that populations evolve by "walking" in a fitness landscape. This "adaptive walk" is characterised by a pattern of diminishing returns, where populations further away from their fitness optimum take larger steps than those closer to their optimal conditions. Hence, we expect young genes to evolve faster and experience mutations with stronger fitness effects than older genes because they are further away from their fitness optimum. Testing this hypothesis, however, constitutes an arduous task. Young genes are small, encode proteins with a higher degree of intrinsic disorder, are expressed at lower levels, and are involved in species-specific adaptations. Since all these factors lead to increased protein evolutionary rates, they could be masking the effect of gene age. While controlling for these factors, we used population genomic data sets of Arabidopsis and Drosophila and estimated the rate of adaptive substitutions across genes from different phylostrata. We found that a gene's evolutionary age significantly impacts the molecular rate of adaptation. Moreover, we observed that substitutions in young genes tend to have larger physicochemical effects. Our study, therefore, provides strong evidence that molecular evolution follows an adaptive walk model across a large evolutionary timescale.
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