Epistasis and Entropy

Crona, Kristina

doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1006322

Cited by 2 publications

References 12 publications

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Shared Information between Residues Is Sufficient to Detect Pairwise Epistasis in a Protein

Gupta

Adami

2016

PLoS Genet

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In a comment [1] on our manuscript "Strong selection significantly increases epistatic interactions in the long-term evolution of a protein" [2], Dr. Crona challenges our assertion that shared entropy (that is, information) between two residues implies epistasis between those residues, by constructing an explicit example of three loci (say A, B, and C), where A and B are epistatically linked (leading to shared entropy between A and B), and A and C also depend epistatically (leading to shared entropy between A and C), so that loci B and C are correlated (share entropy). She goes on to assert that (as per her examples), even though there will be correlations (and thus shared entropy) between the residues at loci B and C, there is no pair-wise epistasis between loci B and C, contradicting our assertion in [2] that shared entropy implies epistasis.The disagreement is based on two different interpretations of the meaning of pair-wise epistasis, and the comment gives us an opportunity to discuss those.We do not disagree that epistasis refers to mutational effects that are conditional on the states of other alleles. In our paper, we are in particular interested in pair-wise epistasis, that is, how the fitness effects of mutations at two loci depend on each other. Of course, the dependence between those two loci could depend on the state of many other alleles in the genome. The different interpretations of epistasis hinge upon whether a quantitative

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