Book Description
In this paper the authors consider the evolutionary dynamics of populations of sequences, under a process of selection at the phenotypic level of structures. They use a simple graph-theoretic representation of structures which captures well the properties of the mapping between RNA sequences and their molecular structure. Each sequence is assigned to a structure by means of a sequence-to-structure mapping. The authors make the basic assumption that every fitness landscape can be factorized through the structures. The set of all sequences that map into a particular random structure can then be modeled as a random graph in sequence space, the so-called neutral network. They analyze in detail how an evolving population searches for new structures, in particular how they switch from one neutral network to another. They verify that transitions occur directly between neutral networks, and study the effects of different population sizes and the influence of the relatedness of the structures on these transitions. In fitness landscapes where several structures exhibit high fitness, the authors then study evolutionary paths on the structural level taken by the population during its search. They present a new way of expressing structural similarities which are shown to have relevant implications for the time evolution of the population.
