Research
Robustness and Evolvability of Living Systems
Living things are unimaginably complex, yet they have withstood a withering assault of harmful influences over several billion years. These influences include cataclysmic changes in the environment, as well as a constant barrage of internal changes, mutations. And not only has life survived, it has thrived and radiated into millions of diverse species. Such resilience may be surprising, because complexity suggests fragility. If you have ever built a house of cards, you will know what I mean: The house eventually comes tumbling down. Why is an organism not a molecular house of cards? Why do not slight disturbances (especially mutations) cause key organismal functions to fail catastrophically? And is the robustness of organisms to change itself a consequence of past evolution? How does it affect the potential for future innovation in evolution? These are some of the questions we ask in our research.
Selected Publications
Wagner, A. (2005) Robustness and Evolvability in Living Systems. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ [PUP]
Zheng, J., Guo, N., Wagner, A. (2020) Strong selection enhances protein evolvability by increasing mutational robustness and foldability. Science 370, 6521 [reprint request] 
Hosseini, S.-R., Martin, O.C., Wagner, A. (2016) Phenotypic innovation through recombination in genome-scale metabolic networks. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences283: 20161536. [reprint request]
Hayden, E., Bendixsen, D.P., Wagner, A. (2015) Intramolecular phenotypic capacitance in a modular RNA molecule. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, 12444-12449. [reprint request]
171. Bratulic, S., Gerber, F., Wagner, A. (2015) Mistranslation drives the evolution of robustness but not translational accuracy in TEM-1 beta-lactamase. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112 , 12758-12763. [reprint request]
Payne, J.L., Wagner, A. (2014) The robustness and evolvability of transcription factor binding sites. Science 343, 875-877.[link]
Wagner, A. (2012) The role of robustness in phenotypic adaptation and innovation. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 279, 1249-1258.[reprint request]
Wagner, A. (2008) Robustness and evolvability: A paradox resolved. Proc. Roy. Soc. London Series. B 275, 91-100. [reprint request]
Ciliberti, S, Martin, OC, Wagner, A. (2007) Robustness can evolve gradually in complex regulatory networks with varying topology. PLoS Computational Biology 3(2): e15. [reprint request]
Wagner, A . (2005) Robustness, Neutrality,
and Evolvability. FEBS
Letters579: 1772–1778. [reprint request]