Synergistic epistasis and alternative hypotheses

Synergistic epistasis and alternative hypotheses.

Inbreeding generally results in deleterious shifts in mean fitness. If the fitness response to increasing inbreeding coefficient is non-linear, this suggests a contribution of epistasis to inbreeding depression. In a cross-breeding experiment, Salathe & Ebert (2003. J. Evol. Biol. 16: 976-985) tested and found the presence of this non-linearity in Daphnia magna. They argue that epistatic intera...

Evidence for Alternative Hypotheses

Most researchers want evidence for the direction of an effect, not evidence against a point null hypothesis. Such evidence is ideally on a scale that is easily interpretable, with an accompanying standard error. Further, the evidence from identical experiments should be repeatable, and evidence from independent experiments should be easily combined, such as required in meta-analysis. Such a mea...

Negative selection in humans and fruit flies involves synergistic epistasis.

Negative selection against deleterious alleles produced by mutation influences within-population variation as the most pervasive form of natural selection. However, it is not known whether deleterious alleles affect fitness independently, so that cumulative fitness loss depends exponentially on the number of deleterious alleles, or synergistically, so that each additional deleterious allele res...

Alternative Hypotheses of Hybrid Vigor.

Survival of the Curviest: Noise-Driven Selection for Synergistic Epistasis

A major goal of human genetics is to elucidate the genetic architecture of human disease, with the goal of fueling improvements in diagnosis and the understanding of disease pathogenesis. The degree to which epistasis, or non-additive effects of risk alleles at different loci, accounts for common disease traits is hotly debated, in part because the conditions under which epistasis evolves are n...