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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

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

BP 21.7: Vortrag

Mittwoch, 11. März 2026, 17:15–17:30, HÜL/S386

Mean adaptive basin size for fitness peaks in the House of Cards landscape — •Daniel Oros and Joachim Krug — Institute for Biological Physics - University of Cologne

Fitness landscapes have been studied extensively in evolutionary theory. In a simple form, the fitness landscape maps the genotype of an organism to its reproductive success, denoted by fitness. While being a drastic simplification of biology, the concept is useful for understanding how evolution navigates such a landscape. When the time between mutations is much larger than the fixation time, one can think of a genetically homogeneous population moving one mutation at a time. The fitness value increases at each step and the population eventually reaches a fitness peak, a genotype having larger fitness than all its single mutant neighbors. The adaptive basin of a peak is composed of all genotypes which have a monotonically increasing fitness path to it.
Large scale fitness landscape measurements show that the basins of high fitness peaks contain a large fraction of all genotypes, a finding that has been argued to be inconsistent with existing fitness landscape models [1]. In House of Cards (HoC) landscapes fitness values are assigned independently at random, resulting in a maximally rugged landscape. Building on previous work on accessibility percolation [2] we show that typical peak adaptive basins in the HoC landscape contain a positive fraction of all genotypes, and derive an explicit expression for the mean basin size.
[1] Papkou A et al. 2023 Science 382 eadh3860
[2] Schmiegelt B and Krug J 2023 J. Math. Biol. 86 46

Keywords: Fitness Landscape; Adaptive Basins; House of Cards model; Evolution