title: Emergent neutrality in adaptive asexual evolution.
abstract: In nonrecombining genomes, genetic linkage can be an important evolutionary force. Linkage generates interference interactions, by which simultaneously occurring mutations affect each other's chance of fixation. Here, we develop a comprehensive model of adaptive evolution in linked genomes, which integrates interference interactions between multiple beneficial and deleterious mutations into a unified framework. By an approximate analytical solution, we predict the fixation rates of these mutations, as well as the probabilities of beneficial and deleterious alleles at fixed genomic sites. We find that interference interactions generate a regime of emergent neutrality: all genomic sites with selection coefficients smaller in magnitude than a characteristic threshold have nearly random fixed alleles, and both beneficial and deleterious mutations at these sites have nearly neutral fixation rates. We show that this dynamic limits not only the speed of adaptation, but also a population's degree of adaptation in its current environment. We apply the model to different scenarios: stationary adaptation in a time-dependent environment and approach to equilibrium in a fixed environment. In both cases, the analytical predictions are in good agreement with numerical simulations. Our results suggest that interference can severely compromise biological functions in an adapting population, which sets viability limits on adaptive evolution under linkage.
authors.affiliation: Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität zu Köln, 50937 Köln, Germany.
authors.forename: Stephan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Schiffels
authors.forename: Gergely J
authors.initials: GJ
authors.lastname: Szöllosi
authors.forename: Ville
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Mustonen
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Lässig
mesh_terms: D000222:Adaptation, Physiological; D005075:Biological Evolution; D016678:Genome; D009154:Mutation; D011336:Probability