Mutation landscapes (Q2177350)

The new idea of the article is that individual genomes are associated not only with a certain value of fitness, but also with a certain frequency of mutations. The authors suggest that large parts of the genome code for enzymes involved in DNA replication or error correction. In the eukaryotic genome, hundreds or thousands of genes contribute to an overall low mutation rate: these are genes that are involved in DNA replication, synthesis of materials for DNA replication, error correction, recombination mechanisms, cell cycle checkpoints, chromosome segregation, etc. The authors wanted to understand pressure selection, which ensures the evolution and adaptation of genes that affect the frequency of mutations. Some basic properties of mutational landscapes have been studied and it was revealed that the interaction between the landscapes of fitness and mutations leads to localization in the landscapes of mutations. The article presents analytical results for localization conditions (error thresholds) on simple landscapes of fitness and mutations.