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Genetic Correlations Greatly Increase Mutational Robustness and Can Both Reduce and Enhance Evolvability

Fig 6

Non-neutral local over-representation correlations result in phenotypes being more likely to be found multiple times around genotypes.

We present results for the three GP maps: A) RNA20, B) S_3,8 and C) HP5x5. We pick the same frequent phenotypes q in each of our biological GP maps as used in Fig 4, and consider the prevalence of q around genotype g with phenotype p, given that q occurs at least once in the 1-mutation neighbourhood of g. The average of across the n = 10 most frequent phenotypes p in the neighbourhood of q (with p ≠ q and p ≠ del), is compared to the respective averages for random null expectations and defined in the text. The mean of each distribution is plotted as a dotted line in each case. Contiguous sections with a probability greater than 10⁻⁵ are joined with lines in order to guide the eye. The mean value of m for each of the biological GP maps and the two random controls are shown as respective dotted lines with the same colours. Compared to the two null expectations of occurrence, q is over-represented locally as demonstrated by the shift of the means to the right.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004773.g006