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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 21: Focus Session: Sequence Spaces, Populations and Evolution

BP 21.2: Talk

Wednesday, March 11, 2026, 15:30–15:45, HÜL/S386

Insertions and Deletions make important contributions to the arrival of phenotypic variation — •Manuela Giraud^1,2 and Nora Martin¹ — ¹CRG (Barcelona Collaboratorium for Modelling and Predictive Biology), Dr. Aiguader 88, Barcelona 08003, Spain — ²Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Barcelona, Spain.

In evolution, phenotypic variation is a prerequisite for selection and arises from random genotypic mutations. An extensive mapping of genotypes to their corresponding phenotype (GP map) provides us with a quantitative model for variation, thus informing evolutionary predictions. The features of GP maps and their relevance for evolutionary processes have been analyzed for different model systems, but these analyses have largely been limited to short substitutions. Insertions and deletions (InDels) of different lengths have been neglected despite their presence in natural sequence families. In this study, we analyze InDels in computational GP maps modelling RNA secondary structure, enzyme functionality, and a toy-model for protein quaternary structure self-assembly. We find that InDels are more likely to preserve the phenotype than expected from null models. These phenotype-conserving indels imply large sequence changes, affecting the effect of subsequent mutations: after a phenotype-conserving InDel, the distribution of accessible phenotypes shifts increasingly with the mutation size. Evolutionary simulations indicate that such phenotype-conserving indels can fix and strongly affect the number of encountered phenotypes. These results imply that InDels, even if rare, can make an important contribution to the arrival of phenotypic variation.

Keywords: genotype-phenotype map; InDels; evolution; sequences