Absorbing Phenomena and Escaping Time for Muller's Ratchet in Adaptive Landscape

TL;DR

This paper uses adaptive landscape theory to analyze Muller's ratchet, providing a comprehensive, parameter-regime-spanning characterization of the absorbing phenomenon and the time to escape deleterious mutation accumulation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, quantitative framework using adaptive landscapes to study Muller's ratchet across all parameter regimes without extraneous assumptions.

Findings

Adaptive landscape exhibits finite/infinite potential and fixed points.

Single click time increases with selection and population size, decreases with mutation.

Absorbing phenomenon characterized by landscape and click time without extraneous assumptions.

Abstract

Background: The accumulation of deleterious mutations of a population directly contributes to the fate as to how long the population would exist, a process often described as Muller's ratchet with the absorbing phenomenon. The key to understand this absorbing phenomenon is to characterize the decaying time of the fittest class of the population. Adaptive landscape introduced by Wright, a re-emerging powerful concept in systems biology, is used as a tool to describe biological processes. To our knowledge, the dynamical behaviors for Muller's ratchet over the full parameter regimes are not studied from the point of the adaptive landscape. And the characterization of the absorbing phenomenon is not yet quantitatively obtained without extraneous assumptions as well. Results: We describe the dynamical behavior of the population exposed to Muller's ratchet in all parameters regimes by adaptive landscape. The adaptive landscape has rich structures such as finite and infinite potential, real and imaginary fixed points. We give the formula about the single click time with finite and infinite potential. And we find the single click time increases with selection rates and population size increasing, decreases with mutation rates increasing. These results provide a new understanding of infinite potential. We analytically demonstrate the adaptive and unadaptive states for the whole parameters regimes. Interesting issues about the parameters regions with the imaginary fixed points is demonstrated. This can help understand the biological meaning of the critical points such as the intersection points of regimes. Most importantly, we find that the absorbing phenomenon is characterized by the adaptive landscape and the single click time without any extraneous assumptions. These results suggest a graphical and quantitative framework to study the absorbing phenomenon.