Accessibility percolation on Cartesian power graphs

Abstract

A fitness landscape is a mapping from a space of discrete genotypes to the real numbers. A path in a fitness landscape is a sequence of genotypes connected by single mutational steps. Such a path is said to be accessible if the fitness values of the genotypes encountered along the path increase monotonically. We study accessible paths on random fitness landscapes of the House-of-Cards type, on which fitness values are independent, identically and continuously distributed random variables. The genotype space is taken to be a Cartesian power graph {mathcal {A}^L}, where L is the number of genetic loci and the allele graph mathcal {A} encodes the possible allelic states and mutational transitions on one locus. The probability of existence of accessible paths between two genotypes at a distance linear in L displays a transition from 0 to a positive value at a threshold beta _text {c} for the fitness difference between the initial and final genotype. We derive a lower bound on beta _text {c} for general mathcal {A} and show that this bound is tight for a large class of allele graphs. Our results generalize previous results for accessibility percolation on the biallelic hypercube, and compare favorably to published numerical results for multiallelic Hamming graphs.