robustness
Martin OC & Wagner A 2009 Effects of recombination on complex regulatory circuits. Genetics 183:673-684.
- recombination has weaker deleterious effects on the expression phenotypes of these circuits than mutations
- if a population of such circuits evolves under the influence of mutation and recombination, we find that three key properties emerge:
- (1) deleterious effects of mutations are reduced dramatically;
- (2) the diversity of genotypes in the population is greatly increased, a feature that may be important for phenotypic innovation;
- (3) cis-regulatory complexes appear
- recombination may even reduce the genetic load in populations subject to stabilizing selection
- our system is very different from simple two- or three-locus models often considered when investigating the effects of recombination
- the intuition derived from such simplified models is that recombination typically has deleterious effects because it breaks up coadapted gene complexes
- this may be true for regulatory regions of different genes
- recombination allowed for greater cooperativity in the same regulatory region
- simple models of few loci do not capture the fact that mutational robustness becomes higher as a result of mutation and even more so through recombination
- in more complex genotype–phenotype maps, this feature is a natural consequence of the organization of a genotype network
