Joshua L. Payne

TL;DR: Recent experimental progress in areas as different as the evolution of drug resistance in cancer cells and the rewiring of transcriptional regulation circuits in vertebrates is reviewed, revealing the importance of multiple genetic and non-genetic mechanisms to generate phenotypic diversity, robustness in genetic systems, and adaptive landscape topography.

TL;DR: It is shown that the binding sites of larger genotype networks are not only more robust, but the sequences adjacent to such networks can also bind more transcription factors, thus demonstrating that robustness can facilitate evolvability.

TL;DR: On the longest evolutionary timescales, the robustness of transcriptional regulation has helped shape life as the authors know it, by facilitating evolutionary innovations that helped organisms such as flowering plants and vertebrates diversify.

TL;DR: It is found that the navigability of these landscapes through single mutations is intermediate to that of additive and shuffled null models, suggesting that binding affinity—and thereby gene expression—is readily fine-tuned via mutations in transcription factor binding sites.

TL;DR: To elucidate the underlying genetic mechanisms, directed evolution in Escherichia coli was used to accumulate variation in populations of yellow fluorescent proteins and then evolved these proteins toward the new phenotype of green fluorescence.