Figure 2.

The effectiveness of purging a cryptic sequence of deleterious mutations depends on its expression level. We examined the states of the cryptic sequences of the loci with the 10 highest, the 10 lowest, and the 10 median expression levels among the 600 loci in each of the simulations shown in Figure 1 (σ_E = 2.25). We counted how often each locus contained a deleterious cryptic sequence among the last 20 timepoints we had collected from that simulation. Bars represent the proportion of time that each of the 10 loci carried a deleterious cryptic sequence, averaged over 20 replicates, and shown as mean $\pm \text{SD.}$ Simulations were initialized at low-ρ conditions.