Why are there so many fitness metrics in microbial ecology? I was confused as I started the PhD - and with @michaelmanhart.bsky.social , I developed a framework that unifies existing statistics of relative fitness and shows how they all derive from a few basic principles. Preprint is up! 1/n
Few concepts are as central to evolution as is fitness, and yet the quantification of fitness is often ambiguous. In particular, high-throughput experiments to measure mutant fitness in microbes are i...
We start with a definition: relative fitness is any statistic that is sufficient to predict the relative abundance of the mutant. There is other fitness concepts, like absolute fitness and fitness potentials (used for fitness landscapes) - these are distinct, we focus on relative fitness here. 2/n
