Epistasis refers to the non-additive interactions between genes in determining phenotypes. Considerable efforts have shown that, even for a given organism, epistasis may vary both in intensity and sign. Recent comparative studies supported that the overall sign of epistasis switches from positive to negative as the complexity of an organism increases, and it has been hypothesized that this change shall be a consequence of the underlying gene network properties. Why should this be the case? What characteristics of genetic networks determine the sign of epistasis? Here we show, by evolving genetic networks that differ in their complexity and robustness against perturbations but that perform the same tasks, that robustness increased with complexity and that epistasis was positive for small non-robust networks but negative for large robust ones. Our results indicate that robustness and negative epistasis emerge as a consequence of the existence of redundant elements in regulatory structures of genetic networks and that the correlation between complexity and epistasis is a byproduct of such redundancy, allowing for the decoupling of epistasis from the underlying network complexity.

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation grant BFU2009-06993 (SFE), the Generalitat Valenciana grant PROMETEO2010/019 (SFE), the Human Frontiers Science Program grant RGP12/2008 (SFE and RVS) and the Santa Fe Institute.

Peer reviewed