Statistical theory of phenotype abundance distributions: A test through exact enumeration of genotype spaces

Abstract

The evolutionary dynamics of molecular populations are strongly dependent on the structure of genotype spaces. The map between genotype and phenotype determines how easily genotype spaces can be navigated and the accessibility of evolutionary innovations. In particular, the size of neutral networks corresponding to specific phenotypes and its statistical counterpart, the distribution of phenotype abundance, have been studied through multiple computationally tractable genotype-phenotype maps. In this work, we test a theory that predicts the abundance of a phenotype and the corresponding asymptotic distribution (given the compositional variability of its genotypes) through the exact enumeration of several GP maps. Our theory predicts with high accuracy phenotype abundance, and our results show that, in navigable genotype spaces-characterised by the presence of large neutral networks- phenotype abundance converges to a log-normal distribution.