Mathematical modeling of movement on fitness landscapes

BACKGROUND: Movement of populations on fitness landscapes has been a problem of interest for a long time. While the subject has been extensively developed theoretically, reconciliation of the theoretical work with recent experimental data has not yet happened. In this work, we develop a computational framework and study evolution of the simplest transcription network between a single regulator, R and a single target protein, T. RESULTS: Through our simulations, we track evolution of this transcription network and comment on its dynamics and statistics of this movement. Significantly, we report that there exists a critical parameter which controls the ability of a network to reach the global fitness peak on the landscape. This parameter is the fraction of all permissible values of a biochemical parameter that can be accessed from its current value via a single mutation. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, through this work, we aim to present a general framework for analysis of movement of populations (and particularly regulatory networks) on landscapes. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12918-019-0704-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.