Article,
Visualizing fitness landscapes
Evolution, 65 (6): 1544--1558 (2011)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1558-5646.2011.01236.x
Abstract
Fitness landscapes are a classical concept for thinking about the relationship between genotype and fitness. However, because the space of genotypes is typically high-dimensional, the structure of fitness landscapes can be difficult to understand and the heuristic approach of thinking about fitness landscapes as low-dimensional, continuous surfaces may be misleading. Here, I present a rigorous method for creating low-dimensional representations of fitness landscapes. The basic idea is to plot the genotypes in a manner that reflects the ease or difficulty of evolving from one genotype to another. Such a layout can be constructed using the eigenvectors of the transition matrix describing the evolution of a population on the fitness landscape when mutation is weak. In addition, the eigendecomposition of this transition matrix provides a new, high-level view of evolution on a fitness landscape. I demonstrate these techniques by visualizing the fitness landscape for selection for the amino acid serine and by visualizing a neutral network derived from the RNA secondary structure genotype–phenotype map.
