TITLE: In vitro / in silico evolution: from biology to an explicit sequence-fitness landscape
SPEAKER: Chris Knight (Manchester Centre for Integrative Systems Biology, University of Manchester)

ABSTRACT:

Biologists are typically motivated by the inter-relationships of phenotype (observable characteristics of organisms), genotype (the chemical DNA strings whose change in populations constitutes biological evolution), and organisms’ environments. Understanding the inter-relationship of all three in evolution is a major current challenge in biology. However most attempts to understand these relationships are very anecdotal and any biological system is too complex to get a very meaningful overview of the adaptive ‘landscape’ biological evolution explores. We have attempted to obtain a meaningful overview by moving from full biological systems (with genotypes >106 letters long) to an in vitro biochemical system (with a genotype 30 letters long). I will present results from using in vitro / in silico genetic algorithms in this system, providing an explicit mapping between sequence and fitness for many sequences. This starts to provide a global view of the relationship between genotype and phenotype in evolution for a highly simplified biological system.