On the networked architecture of genotype spaces and its critical effects on molecular evolution

TL;DR

This paper explores how the complex, networked structure of genotype spaces influences molecular evolution, revealing non-uniform dynamics, critical transitions, and rapid adaptation due to phenotypic plasticity and multilayered genotype-function networks.

Contribution

It introduces a network-based framework for understanding genotype spaces, highlighting their critical effects on evolutionary dynamics and phenotypic plasticity.

Findings

Genotype spaces have a complex networked architecture affecting evolution.

Evolutionary dynamics exhibit non-linear responses similar to physical critical phenomena.

Phenotypic plasticity enables rapid adaptation through multiscapes.

Abstract

Evolutionary dynamics is often viewed as a subtle process of change accumulation that causes a divergence among organisms and their genomes. However, this interpretation is an inheritance of a gradualistic view that has been challenged at the macroevolutionary, ecological, and molecular level. Actually, when the complex architecture of genotype spaces is taken into account, the evolutionary dynamics of molecular populations becomes intrinsically non-uniform, sharing deep qualitative and quantitative similarities with slowly driven physical systems: non-linear responses analogous to critical transitions, sudden state changes, or hysteresis, among others. Furthermore, the phenotypic plasticity inherent to genotypes transforms classical fitness landscapes into multiscapes where adaptation in response to an environmental change may be very fast. The quantitative nature of adaptive molecular processes is deeply dependent on a networks-of-networks multilayered structure of the map from genotype to function that we begin to unveil.