Epistasis occurs when the effect of a mutation depends on its carrier's genetic background. Despite increasing evidence that epistasis for fitness is common, role during evolution contentious. Fitness landscapes, which are mappings genotype or phenotype to fitness, capture full extent and complexity epistasis. landscape theory has shown how affects course outcome evolution. Moreover, by measuri...

Epistasis effects (gene interactions) have been increasingly recognized as important genetic factors underlying complex traits. The existence of a large number of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) provides opportunities and challenges to screen DNA variations affecting complex traits using a candidate gene analysis. In this article, four types of epistasis effects of two candidate gene SNP...

High-order epistasis-where the effect of a mutation is determined by interactions with two or more other mutations-makes small, but detectable, contributions to genotype-fitness maps. While epistasis between pairs of mutations is known to be an important determinant of evolutionary trajectories, the evolutionary consequences of high-order epistasis remain poorly understood. To determine the eff...

Mao Y, London NR, Ma L, Dvorkin D, Da Y. Detection of SNP epistasis effects of quantitative traits using an extended Kempthorne model. Physiol Genomics 28: 46–52, 2006. First published August 29, 2006; doi:10.1152/physiolgenomics.00096.2006.—Epistasis effects (gene interactions) have been increasingly recognized as important genetic factors underlying complex traits. The existence of a large nu...

We generated all possible haploid and homozygous diploid genotypes at 6 biosynthetic loci in yeast and scored their fitness to examine whether there was any pattern of weak synergistic epistasis, which is a requirement of the deterministic mutation model for the evolution of sex. We measured 4 components of fitness: haploid growth rate, haploid mating efficiency, diploid growth rate, and diploi...

In this article we focus on how the hierarchical and single-path assumptions of epistasis analysis can bias the inference of gene regulatory networks. Here we emphasize the critical importance of dynamic analyses, and specifically illustrate the use of Boolean network models. Epistasis in a broad sense refers to gene interactions, however, as originally proposed by Bateson, epistasis is defined...

Epistasis for fitness means that the selective effect of a mutation is conditional on the genetic background in which it appears. Although epistasis is widely observed in nature, our understanding of its consequences for evolution by natural selection remains incomplete. In particular, much attention focuses only on its influence on the instantaneous rate of changes in frequency of selected all...

the choice of an efficient breeding procedure depends to a large extent on knowledge of the genetic system controlling the character to be selected. the objective of this study was to determine genetic parameters for yield and other traits including some of the yield components under three planting densities, using analysis of generation means (p1, p2, f1, f2, bc1 and bc2) derived from crosses ...

Adaptive evolution ultimately is fuelled by mutations generating novel genetic variation. Non-additivity of fitness effects of mutations (called epistasis) may affect the dynamics and repeatability of adaptation. However, understanding the importance and implications of epistasis is hampered by the observation of substantial variation in patterns of epistasis across empirical studies. Interesti...

How, and to what extent, does the environment influence the way mutations interact? Do environmental changes affect both the sign and the magnitude of epistasis? Are there any correlations between environments in the variability, sign or magnitude of epistasis? Very few studies have tackled these questions. Here, we addressed them in the context of viral emergence. Most emerging viruses are RNA...