New preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
A theory to explain global epistasis in microbial communities
1/5
Global epistasis is observed everywhere from proteins to ecosystems, yet we don't know why. The effect of a perturbation such as a mutation or addition of a species on fitness or function depends linearly on the fitness or function in the absence of the perturbation.
5/5
...since the latter requires probing high-dimensional compositional landscapes that appear to disguise low-dimensional processes governed by resource exchange or competition.
2/5
Despite how widely it appears across biological scales, the mechanisms giving rise to it are unclear. In a new preprint I propose a simple mechanism for the observation of global epistasis in ecosystems.