Berlin 2018 – scientific programme
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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik
DY 63: Statistical Physics of Biological Systems II (joint session BP/DY)
DY 63.5: Talk
Thursday, March 15, 2018, 16:00–16:15, H 2013
Modelling the Emergence of Robustness and Evolvability in Genotype-Phenotype Maps — •Marcel Weiß1,2 and Sebastian E. Ahnert1,2 — 1Theory of Condensed Matter Group, Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK — 2Sainsbury Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Genotype-Phenotype (GP) maps play an important role in evolution and their properties fundamentally affect the outcome of evolutionary processes. A striking property found in several GP maps, such as that of RNA secondary structure, is the positive correlation between the robustness and evolvability of phenotypes, meaning that a phenotype can be strongly robust against mutations and at the same time evolvable to a diverse range of alternative phenotypes. By introducing two analytically tractable GP map models that follow the principles of real biological GP maps, we study the characteristics that cause this positive correlation between phenotype robustness and evolvability. We find that it only emerges if mutations can have non-local effects on sequence constraints, highlighting that these effects are likely to be an important feature of many biological GP maps.