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closeFidelity of mutator locus constant or variable?
Posted by bostman on 30 Sep 2008 at 20:53 GMT
From your descriptions I am unsure whether the fidelity of \mu was held constant or if it was variable.
From the results section page 3:
"Finally, we let the mutation rate apply reflexively to itself, such that high-fidelity genotypes rarely changed their mutation rates whereas low-fidelity genotypes did so frequently."
But in the methods section page 7 you say:
"In treatments where the mutation rate could change, \mu
had a constant and high probability \Pi of changing by a small
amount during any replication cycle."
Which is it?
Both!
bostman replied to bostman on 01 Oct 2008 at 07:09 GMT
Ok ok, I missed it in the first reading. Sorry. You did both, of course. And I see no matter what, the mutation rates evolved to suboptimal rates.
I've done a similar experiment in the NK-landscape, where the K parameter controls the ruggedness. For a rugged landscape (high K), I found that I could only evolve non-zero mutation rates if I reset the landscape at random every ten generations.