Probabilistic genotype-phenotype maps reveal mutational robustness of RNA folding, spin glasses, and quantum circuits

Abstract

Recent studies of genotype-phenotype maps have reported universally enhanced phenotypic robustness to genotype mutations, a feature essential to evolution. Virtually all of these studies make a simplifying assumption that each genotype—represented as a sequence—maps deterministically to a single phenotype, such as a discrete structure. Here we introduce probabilistic genotype-phenotype (PrGP) maps, where each genotype maps to a vector of phenotype probabilities, as a more realistic and universal language for investigating robustness in a variety of physical, biological, and computational systems. We study three model systems to show that PrGP maps offer a generalized framework which can handle uncertainty emerging from various physical sources: (1) thermal fluctuation in RNA folding, (2) external field disorder in the spin-glass ground state search problem, and (3) superposition and entanglement in quantum circuits, which are realized experimentally on IBM quantum computers. In all three cases, we observe a biphasic robustness scaling which is enhanced relative to random expectation for more frequent phenotypes and approaches random expectation for less frequent phenotypes. We derive an analytical theory for the behavior of PrGP robustness, and we demonstrate that the theory is highly predictive of empirical robustness.