When can fitness epistasis be ignored in a polygenic trait at equilibrium?

When can fitness epistasis be ignored in a polygenic trait at equilibrium? | bioRxiv Skip to main content Home About Submit ALERTS / RSS Search for this keyword Advanced Search New Results When can fitness epistasis be ignored in a polygenic trait at equilibrium? View ORCID Profile Archana Devi , View ORCID Profile Kavita Jain doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.01.25.525607 Archana Devi a Department of Mathematics, University of Vienna , Oskar-Morgenstern-Platz 1, 1090, Vienna, Austria Find this author on Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for this author on this site ORCID record for Archana Devi For correspondence: archana.devi{at}univie.ac.at Kavita Jain b Theoretical Sciences Unit, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research ,, Bangalore, 560064, India Find this author on Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for this author on this site ORCID record for Kavita Jain Abstract Full Text Info/History Metrics Preview PDF ABSTRACT Although many phenotypic traits are determined by a large number of genetic variants, the behavior of allele frequencies in a polygenic trait is not completely understood. The problem is especially challenging when the quantitative trait of interest is under epistatic selection as the allele frequency at a locus is affected by those at other loci. Here, we consider a panmictic, diploid finite population evolving under stabilizing selection and symmetric mutations when the population is in linkage equilibrium. In the stationary state, using a diffusion theory, we calculate the marginal distribution of allele frequency, and find parameter regimes where fitness epistasis can not be ignored for an accurate description of the frequency distribution. For such parameters, the mean deviation in the phenotypic optimum and genic variance are, however, found to be well captured even when epistatic interactions are neglected. Thus, while the presence of epistasis may not be evident in phenotypic quantities, it can strongly affect the allele frequency distribution. We also find that the allele frequency distribution at a locus is unimodal if its effect size is below a threshold effect and bimodal otherwise; these results are the stochastic analog of the deterministic ones where the stable allele frequency becomes bistable when the effect size exceeds a threshold. Our analytical results are verified against Monte Carlo simulations and numerical integration of a Langevin equation. Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Footnotes jain{at}jncasr.ac.in (K. Jain) https://ufind.univie.ac.at/en/person.html?id=1010614 (A. Devi); https://www.jncasr.ac.in/faculty/jain (K. Jain) Significantly revised version: no change in previous results, new results added, focus on stationary state Copyright The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license . 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Archana Devi , Kavita Jain bioRxiv 2023.01.25.525607; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.01.25.525607 Share This Article: Copy Citation Tools When can fitness epistasis be ignored in a polygenic trait at equilibrium? Archana Devi , Kavita Jain bioRxiv 2023.01.25.525607; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.01.25.525607 Citation Manager Formats BibTeX Bookends EasyBib EndNote (tagged) EndNote 8 (xml) Medlars Mendeley Papers RefWorks Tagged Ref Manager RIS Zotero Tweet Widget Facebook Like Google Plus One Subject Area Evolutionary Biology Subject Areas All Articles Animal Behavior and Cognition (7998) Biochemistry (18706) Bioengineering (14824) Bioinformatics (44326) Biophysics (22546) Cancer Biology (19665) Cell Biology (26832) Clinical Trials (138) Developmental Biology (13929) Ecology (20965) Epidemiology (2067) Evolutionary Biology (25405) Genetics (16143) Genomics (23460) Immunology (18665) Microbiology (42386) Molecular Biology (18015) Neuroscience (93280) Paleontology (699) Pathology (2976) Pharmacology and Toxicology (5082) Physiology (8097) Plant Biology (15963) Scientific Communication and Education (2094) Synthetic Biology (4547) Systems Biology (10214) Zoology (2382)

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