Genotypes with phenotypes Adventures in an RNA toy world.pdf

Genotyp es with phenotyp es Adventures in an RNA toy world Peter Schuster  Institut f ur Theoretische Chemie und Strahlenchemie Universitat Wien A Wien Austria and Santa Fe Institute Santa Fe NM USA Abstract Evolution has created the complexity of the animate world and deciphering the language of evolution is the key towards understanding nature The dynamics of evolution is simplied by considering it as a sup erp osition of three less sophisticated pro cesses p opulation dynamics p opulation supp ort dynamics and genotyp ephenotyp e mapping Evolution of molecules in lab oratory assays provides a suciently simple system for the quantitative analysis of the three phenomena Coarsegrained notions of structures like RNA secondary structures are used as mo del phenotyp es They provide an excellent to ol for a comprehensive analysis of the entire complex of molecular evolution The mapping from RNA genotyp es into secondary structures is highly redundant In order to nd at least one sequence for every common structures one need only search a relatively small part of sequence space The existence of selectively neutral phenotyp es plays an imp ortant role for the the success and the eciency of evolutionary opti mization Molecular evolution found a highly promising technological application in the design of biomolecules with predened prop erties Keywords Dynamics of evolution evolutionary biotechnology tness landscap e molecular evolution RNA structure selective neutrality Evolution and molecules A statement like The b o ok of life is written in the language of evolution lo oks like a rephrasing of Theo dosius Dobzhanskys famous sentence Nothing