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The fate of a mutation in a fluctuating environment

Ivana Cvijović, Benjamin H. Good, Elizabeth R. Jerison, Michael M. Desai
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/016709
Ivana Cvijović
1Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and FAS Center for Systems Biology,
3Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA
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Benjamin H. Good
1Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and FAS Center for Systems Biology,
2Department of Physics, Cambridge, MA 02138
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Elizabeth R. Jerison
1Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and FAS Center for Systems Biology,
2Department of Physics, Cambridge, MA 02138
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Michael M. Desai
1Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and FAS Center for Systems Biology,
2Department of Physics, Cambridge, MA 02138
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Abstract

Natural environments are never truly constant, but the evolutionary implications of temporally varying selection pressures remain poorly understood. Here we investigate how the fate of a new mutation in a variable environment depends on the dynamics of environmental fluctuations and on the selective pressures in each condition. We find that even when a mutation experiences many environmental epochs before fixing or going extinct, its fate is not necessarily determined by its time-averaged selective effect. Instead, environmental variability reduces the efficiency of selection across a broad parameter regime, rendering selection unable to distinguish between mutations that are substantially beneficial and substantially deleterious on average. Temporal fluctuations can also dramatically increase fixation probabilities, often making the details of these fluctuations more important than the average selection pressures acting on each new mutation. For example, mutations that result in a tradeoff between conditions but are strongly deleterious on average can nevertheless be more likely to fix than mutations that are always neutral or beneficial. These effects can have important implications for patterns of molecular evolution in variable environments, and they suggest that it may often be difficult for populations to maintain specialist traits, even when their loss leads to a decline in time-averaged fitness.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted March 18, 2015.
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The fate of a mutation in a fluctuating environment
Ivana Cvijović, Benjamin H. Good, Elizabeth R. Jerison, Michael M. Desai
bioRxiv 016709; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/016709
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The fate of a mutation in a fluctuating environment
Ivana Cvijović, Benjamin H. Good, Elizabeth R. Jerison, Michael M. Desai
bioRxiv 016709; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/016709

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