The impact of dominance on adaptation in changing environments

Natural environments are seldom static and therefore it is important to ask how a population adapts in a changing environment. We consider a finite, diploid population evolving in a periodically changing environment and study how the fixation probability of a rare mutant depends on its dominance coefficient and the rate of environmental change. We find that in slowly changing environments, the effect of dominance is the same as in the static environment, that is, if a mutant is beneficial (deleterious) when it appears, it is more (less) likely to fix if it is dominant. But in fast changing environments, the effect of dominance can be different from that in the static environment and is determined by the mutant’s fitness at the time of appearance as well as that in the time-averaged environment. We find that in a rapidly varying environment which is neutral on average, an initially beneficial (deleterious) mutant that arises while selection is decreasing (increasing) has a fixation probability lower (higher) than that for a neutral mutant as a result of which the recessive (dominant) mutant is favored. If the environment is beneficial (deleterious) on average but the mutant is deleterious (beneficial) when it appears in the population, the dominant (recessive) mutant is favored in a fast changing environment. We also find that when recurrent mutations occur, dominance does not have a strong influence on evolutionary dynamics.