The study of genetic interactions (epistasis) is central to the understanding of genome organization and evolution. A general correlation between epistasis and genomic complexity has been recently shown, such that in simpler genomes epistasis is antagonistic on average (mutational effects tend to cancel each other out), whereas a transition towards synergistic epistasis occurs in more complex g...

Epistasis, the interaction between genes, is a topic of current interest in molecular and quantitative genetics. A large amount of research has been devoted to the detection and investigation of epistatic interactions. However, there has been much confusion in the literature over definitions and interpretations of epistasis. In this review, we provide a historical background to the study of epi...

The main purpose of this text is to present a brief overview of recent results on epistasis. The first part of the note introduces epistasis and deals with epistasis on finite search spaces. It covers both minimally epistatic, i.e., linear, and maximally epistatic functions. The second part introduces epistasis and excess values on infinite search spaces. Some properties of this generalization ...

High-order epistasis has been observed in many genotype-phenotype maps. These multi-way interactions between mutations may be useful for dissecting complex traits and could have profound implications for evolution. Alternatively, they could be a statistical artifact. High-order epistasis models assume the effects of mutations should add, when they could in fact multiply or combine in some other...

MOTIVATION Epistasis is the interactions among multiple genetic variants. It has emerged to explain the 'missing heritability' that a marginal genetic effect does not account for by genome-wide association studies, and also to understand the hierarchical relationships between genes in the genetic pathways. The Fisher's geometric model is common in detecting the epistatic effects. However, despi...

The impact of epistasis on the evolution of multi-locus traits depends on recombination. While sexually reproducing eukaryotes recombine so frequently that epistasis between polymorphisms is not considered to play a large role in short-term adaptation, many bacteria also recombine, some to the degree that their populations are described as "panmictic" or "freely recombining." However, whether t...

The calpain gene family and its inhibitors have diverse effects, many related to protein turnover, which appear to affect a range of phenotypes such as diabetes, exercise-induced muscle injury, and pathological events associated with degenerative neural diseases in humans, fertility, longevity, and postmortem effects on meat tenderness in livestock species. The calpains are inhibited by calpast...