Extended Data Fig. 3: Patterns of correlation between mutational effect and background fitness/phenotype for individual beneficial or deleterious mutations in various landscapes.

a, Boxplots showing distributions of correlations in a series of n-order landscapes of 16 sites (where the highest order of nonzero interaction is indicated on the X-axis) for beneficial (blue) and deleterious (red) mutations, respectively. The lower and upper edges of a box represent the first (qu1) and third (qu3) quartiles, respectively, the horizontal line inside the box indicates the median (md), the whiskers extend to the most extreme values inside inner fences, md ± 1.5(qu3 − qu1), and the dots represent values outside the inner fences (outliers). b-d, Frequency distributions of correlations for individual beneficial mutations (blue) and deleterious mutations (red) in the tRNA (b), GFP (c), and RNA stability (d) landscapes. Whether a mutation is beneficial or deleterious is determined in reference to the wild-type (tRNA and GFP) or an arbitrary reference genotype (n-order and RNA stability). The wider distribution for deleterious than beneficial mutations is at least in part due to the larger number of deleterious than beneficial mutations.