PDF(Pubmed)
Abstract：
Climate change will fundamentally reshape life on Earth in the coming decades. Therefore, understanding the extent to which species will cope with rising temperatures is of paramount importance. Phenotypic plasticity is the ability of an organism to change the morphological and functional traits encoded by its genome in response to the environment. I show here that plasticity pervades not only natural but also artificial systems that mimic the developmental process of biological organisms, such as self-replicating and evolving computer programs-digital organisms. Specifically, the environment can modify the sequence of instructions executed from a digital organism\'s genome (i.e. its transcriptome), which results in changes in its phenotype (i.e. the ability of the digital organism to perform Boolean logic operations). This genetic-based pathway for plasticity comes at a fitness cost to an organism\'s viability and generation time: the longer the transcriptome (higher fitness cost), the more chances for the environment to modify the genetic execution flow control, and the higher the likelihood for the genome to encode novel phenotypes. By studying to what extent a digital organism\'s phenotype is influenced by both its genome and the environment, I make a parallelism between natural and artificial evolving systems on how natural selection might slide trait regulation anywhere along a continuum from total environmental control to total genomic control, which harbours lessons not only for designing evolvable artificial systems, but also for synthetic biology.
摘要：
气候变化将在未来几十年从根本上重塑地球上的生命。因此,了解物种在多大程度上应对气温上升至关重要。表型可塑性是生物体响应于环境而改变其基因组编码的形态和功能性状的能力。我在这里表明，可塑性不仅遍及自然系统，而且还遍及模仿生物有机体发育过程的人工系统，例如自我复制和进化的计算机程序-数字生物。具体来说,环境可以修改从数字生物体的基因组（即其转录组）执行的指令序列，这导致其表型的变化(即数字生物体执行布尔逻辑运算的能力)。这种基于遗传的可塑性途径对生物体的生存能力和生成时间造成了适应性成本：转录组越长（适应性成本越高），环境修改基因执行流程控制的机会越多，基因组编码新表型的可能性越高。通过研究数字生物的表型在多大程度上受到其基因组和环境的影响，我在自然和人工进化系统之间进行了平行研究，研究自然选择如何在从完全环境控制到完全基因组控制的连续体中任何地方滑动性状调节，它不仅为设计可进化的人工系统提供了教训，还有合成生物学。
