Who are my Neighbours? Selection Targets Robustness to Full Replication Events, Not to Individual Mutations

Clicks: 48
ID: 329806
2026
Free PDF
Article Quality & Performance Metrics
Overall Quality
Not rated
Combines reader engagement with the AI quality analysis. This article has not been analysed, so there is no overall score — reader engagement is measured and shown alongside.
AI Quality Assessment
Not analyzed
Readership in this journal
Emerging

Ranked #58 of 392 articles by views in current genetics

Most read Least read

Bar heights use a square-root scale. Only the 120 most-read articles are drawn; the journal has 392 in total.

Mint this article as an NFT
Not yet minted

Create a permanent, verifiable on-chain record of this article on the Scimatic Network. The NFT is held in your Journament account, and you can withdraw it to your own wallet at any time.

5 SUSD one-off · no wallet required
Sign in to mint
Abstract
Theory predicts that populations should evolve mutational robustness --- the ability to maintain a constant phenotype despite mutations. However, selection does not operate on individual mutations but on phenotypes resulting from entire replication events, which may involve a variable number of mutations. We therefore distinguish mutational robustness from replicative robustness, defined as the probability that a replication event produces similarly fit offspring. Mutational and replicative robustness may seem closely aligned at first sight, but we show with an evolutionary simulation model that they can be selected in opposite directions. Our results show that while genomes with high redundancy and/or large amounts of non-coding DNA are mutationally robust, they are replicatively fragile because their size increases the number of mutations per replication. This is especially relevant when genomes are at risk of severe disruption from chromosomal rearrangements. Our results expose limits of the fitness landscape metaphor in the context of robustness evolution: neutral plateaus may be mutationally robust but replicatively unstable and therefore disfavoured by selection, whereas narrow peaks arising from densely encoded genomes can replicate more reliably. Our results identify replicative robustness as a distinct target of selection that depends not only on tolerance to individual mutations but also on their overall likelihood of occurring.
Reference Key
openalex_W7214395575 Use this key to autocite in the manuscript while using SciMatic Manuscript Manager or Thesis Manager
Authors Juliette Luiselli, Guillaume Beslon, Pieter Van den Berg
Are you one of these authors? Claim your profile
Journal current genetics
Year 2026
DOI
10.1093/genetics/iyag260
URL
https://doi.org/10.1093/genetics/iyag260
Keywords Keywords not found

Citations

No citations found. To add a citation, contact the admin at info@scimatic.org

Comments

No comments yet. Be the first to comment on this article.