Fig. 6.—

Genetic rewiring patterns predict loss of environmental plasticity in response to neutral backgrounds. (A) Environmental plasticity exhibited by 4,000 different metabolisms originated from the WT after following a neutral deletion trajectory. Plasticity is scored as the median of the fitnesses (growth ratio) of each genotype in 1,000 randomly generated environments (growth ratio, in a given environment, is the division between growth rate of a particular metabolism to the WT growth rate). We highlight in red the groups with HG and LG. (B) Fraction of conserved interactions by type and LG or HG genotypes. (C) Distribution of the number of essential genes in the HG and LG groups. (D) We performed a bootstrapping analysis to check for enrichment/depletion of each metabolic gene in the LG or HG trajectories. Genes significantly enriched (or depleted) in the HG genotype, LG genotype, or both were correspondingly colored in blue, yellow, and green (P < 0.01, after multiple testing). Inset. Percentage of genes with genetic interactions in the WT network in these significant groups. Interaction classes denoted as figure 2.