Pleiotropy promotes the evolution of inducible immune responses in a model of host-pathogen coevolution
Fig 3
Analysis of network robustness to silenced signaling proteins under different implementations of pleiotropy.
The y-axis shows the mean absolute difference in effector levels between intact networks and single signaling protein knockout networks. Effector levels were measured during infection by a parasite that could not manipulate host immune signaling. Blue dots correspond to pleiotropic signaling protein knock outs, green dots correspond to knocking out of a single non-pleiotropic protein. All plots on the same row have the same chance of infection (10%, 50%, or 90% descending), and plots in the same column have the same implementation of pleiotropy. There are no pleiotropic nodes in non-pleiotropic networks (leftmost column), so nodes were just chosen at random twice. The networks used in this analysis were the most common network at the end of the simulation from which they originated. Asterisks denote significant differences between pleiotropic and non-pleiotropic knock outs.