on the accessibility of adaptive phenotypes of a bacterial metabolic network可访问性的细菌代谢网络的适应性表型.pdfVIP

On the Accessibility of Adaptive Phenotypes of a Bacterial Metabolic Network 1 2 3 Wilfred Ndifon *, Joshua B. Plotkin , Jonathan Dushoff 1 Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America, 2 Department of Biology and Program in Applied Mathematics and Computational Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America, 3 Department of Biology, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada Abstract The mechanisms by which adaptive phenotypes spread within an evolving population after their emergence are understood fairly well. Much less is known about the factors that influence the evolutionary accessibility of such phenotypes, a pre-requisite for their emergence in a population. Here, we investigate the influence of environmental quality on the accessibility of adaptive phenotypes of Escherichia coli’s central metabolic network. We used an established flux- balance model of metabolism as the basis for a genotype-phenotype map (GPM). We quantified the effects of seven qualitatively different environments (corresponding to both carbohydrate and gluconeogenic metabolic substrates) on the structure of this GPM. We found that the GPM has a more rugged structure in qualitatively poorer environments, suggesting that adaptive phenotypes could be intrinsically less accessible in such environments. Nevertheless, on average ,74% of the genotype can be altered by neutral drift, in the environment where the GPM is most rugged; this could allow evolving populations to circumvent such ruggedness. Furthermore, we found that the normalized mutual information (NMI) of geno