ArticleNature ecology & evolution2022
The structure of genotype-phenotype maps makes fitness landscapes navigable.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 42 papers.
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Who cites it
42 citing papers in PubMed.
- Graph-based representations in modern protein science.The Biochemical journal · 2026Review
- Evolutionary strategies of late-stage diversification in bacterial biosynthetic gene clusters.Essays in biochemistry · 2026Review
- Direct estimation of genotype fitness from time series.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Internalized Evolutionary Inertia on Body Plan Evolution.Evolution & development · 2026Review
- 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 · 2026Article
- Reply: neutral transcriptome rewiring promotes quantitative disease resistance evolvability at the species level.The Plant cell · 2026Article
- Constrained evolutionary funnels shape viral immune escape.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Hierarchical genotype networks and incipient ecological speciation in Q[Formula: see text] phage quasispecies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Descent from a common ancestor restricts exploration of protein sequence space.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Predicting the topography of fitness landscapes from the structure of genotype-phenotype maps.Genetics · 2026Article
- Deep homology and design of proteasome chaperone proteins in Candidozyma auris.Nature communications · 2026Article
- From genes to collective modes: biological constraints shape metabolic evolution.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Genotype-fitness mapping of adaptive mutants reveals shifting low-dimensional structure across divergent environments.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Epistatic drift in protein evolution.Current opinion in genetics & development · 2025Review
- Constrained Evolutionary Funnels Shape Viral Immune Escape.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Bounding phenotype transition probabilities via conditional complexity.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Evolvability in vertebrate segmentation.Seminars in cell & developmental biology · 2025Review
- Language models reveal a complex sequence basis for adaptive convergent evolution of protein functions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The balance between intrinsic and ecological fitness reveals hidden regimes in eco-evolutionary population dynamics.Research square · 2025Article
- The balance between intrinsic and ecological fitness reveals hidden regimes in eco-evolutionary population dynamics.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Fitness landscapes are often described in terms of 'peaks' and 'valleys', indicating an intuitive low-dimensional landscape of the kind encountered in everyday experience. The space of genotypes, however, is extremely high dimensional, which results in counter-intuitive structural properties of genotype-phenotype maps. Here we show that these properties, such as the presence of pervasive neutral networks, make fitness landscapes navigable. For three biologically realistic genotype-phenotype map models-RNA secondary structure, protein tertiary structure and protein complexes-we find that, even under random fitness assignment, fitness maxima can be reached from almost any other phenotype without passing through fitness valleys. This in turn indicates that true fitness valleys are very rare. By considering evolutionary simulations between pairs of real examples of functional RNA sequences, we show that accessible paths are also likely to be used under evolutionary dynamics. Our findings have broad implications for the prediction of natural evolutionary outcomes and for directed evolution.
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