ArticleMolecular biology and evolution2023
Not Quite Lost in Translation: Mistranslation Alters Adaptive Landscape Topography and the Dynamics of Evolution.
Article in Molecular biology and evolution, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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4 citing papers in PubMed, 7 citations in OpenAlex.
- How far can you go? Extrapolating values of catalytic activity from known protein landscapes in natural and directed evolution.Chemical Society reviews · 2026Review
- Mutations in ribosomal protein uS5 alter translation fidelity and mutagenesis inJournal of bacteriology · 2025Article
- Cost of Altered Translation Accuracy Shapes Adaptation to Antibiotics in E. coli.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Virus Propagation Linked to Exceedingly Rare Gene-Expression Errors: A Single-Molecule Microscopy Demonstration.ACS chemical biology · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Mistranslation-the erroneous incorporation of amino acids into nascent proteins-is a source of protein variation that is orders of magnitude more frequent than DNA mutation. Like other sources of nongenetic variation, it can affect adaptive evolution. We study the evolutionary consequences of mistranslation with experimental data on mistranslation rates applied to three empirical adaptive landscapes. We find that mistranslation generally flattens adaptive landscapes by reducing the fitness of high fitness genotypes and increasing that of low fitness genotypes, but it does not affect all genotypes equally. Most importantly, it increases genetic variation available to selection by rendering many neutral DNA mutations nonneutral. Mistranslation also renders some beneficial mutations deleterious and vice versa. It increases the probability of fixation of 3-8% of beneficial mutations. Even though mistranslation increases the incidence of epistasis, it also allows populations evolving on a rugged landscape to evolve modestly higher fitness. Our observations show that mistranslation is an important source of nongenetic variation that can affect adaptive evolution on fitness landscapes in multiple ways.
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