Rank orders have been studied in evolutionary biology for almost a hundred years. Constraints on the order in which mutations accumulate are known from cancer drug treatment, and order constraints for species invasions are important in ecology. However, current theory on rank orders in biology is somewhat fragmented. Here we show how our previous work on inferring genetic interactions from comparative fitness data (Crona et al., 2017) is related to an influential approach to rank orders based on sign epistasis. Our approach depends on order perturbations that indicate interactions. We apply our results to malaria parasites and find that order perturbations beyond sign epistasis are prevalent for the antimalarial drug resistance landscape. This finding agrees with the observation that reversed evolution back to the ancestral type is difficult. Another application concerns bacteria adapting to a methanol environment.

中文翻译：

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进化生物学中的排名顺序和签署的相互作用

等级顺序已经在进化生物学中研究了近一百年。从癌症药物治疗中已知突变积累顺序的限制，而物种入侵的顺序限制在生态学中很重要。但是，当前有关生物学中等级排序的理论有些零碎。在这里，我们展示了我们以前根据比较适合度数据推断遗传相互作用的工作（Crona等人，2017）如何与基于体征上位的有序排序有影响的方法相关。我们的方法取决于指示相互作用的顺序扰动。我们将我们的结果应用于疟原虫，发现在抗疟药耐药性方面，除体征上位外的秩序扰动普遍存在。这一发现与这样的观察结果一致，即很难将进化逆转回祖先类型。