None of us are looking for extra work to do, but when invited to write a Perspective for this great paper out of the lab of Andreas Wagner, Jessica Lee (now at Global Viral) and I made time to make it happen. The Research Article from Zheng et al. – “Cryptic genetic variation accelerates evolution by opening access to diverse adaptive peaks” (Science, 2019. 365:347-353) – took advantage of the ability to select upon fluorescent proteins in a FACS machine to impose various selective pressures. They permitted cryptic variation to accumulate by imposing purifying selection upon yellow fluorescence for yfp variants. They then used this pool to begin selecting upon the upper range of green fluorescence. These diverse pools adapted faster and through a wider variety of paths than if they just began with the single ancestral yfp variant.
In our Perspective – “Tales from the cryp(ic)” (Science, 2019. 365:318-319) – we enjoyed pointing out comparisons to some awesome work of friends and colleagues that touched upon these questions: Jeremey Draghi‘s exploration of robustness, Eric Hayden‘s similar work with ribozymes, and Joe Thornton and Mike Harm‘s use of ancestral reconstruction to look at epistasis from a historical perspective.