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Empirical Investigations Of Rna Fitness Landscapes: Harnessing The Power Of High-Throughput Sequencing And Evolutionary Simulations, Devin Pratt Bendixsen

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Fitness landscapes or adaptive landscapes represent the mapping of genotype (sequence) to phenotype (function or fitness). Originally proposed as a metaphor to envision evolutionary processes and mutational interactions, the fitness landscape has recently transitioned from theoretical to empirical. This is due in part to advances in DNA synthesis and high-throughput sequencing. This allows for the construction and analysis of empirical fitness landscapes that encompass thousands of genotypes. These landscapes provide tractable insight into mutational pathways, the predictability of evolution or even the evolution of life. RNA enzymes (ribozymes) are an attractive model system for the construction of empirical fitness landscapes. …