TY - JOUR AB - Empirical essays of fitness landscapes suggest that they may be rugged, that is having multiple fitness peaks. Such fitness landscapes, those that have multiple peaks, necessarily have special local structures, called reciprocal sign epistasis (Poelwijk et al. in J Theor Biol 272:141–144, 2011). Here, we investigate the quantitative relationship between the number of fitness peaks and the number of reciprocal sign epistatic interactions. Previously, it has been shown (Poelwijk et al. in J Theor Biol 272:141–144, 2011) that pairwise reciprocal sign epistasis is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the existence of multiple peaks. Applying discrete Morse theory, which to our knowledge has never been used in this context, we extend this result by giving the minimal number of reciprocal sign epistatic interactions required to create a given number of peaks. AU - Saona Urmeneta, Raimundo J AU - Kondrashov, Fyodor AU - Khudiakova, Kseniia ID - 11447 IS - 8 JF - Bulletin of Mathematical Biology KW - Computational Theory and Mathematics KW - General Agricultural and Biological Sciences KW - Pharmacology KW - General Environmental Science KW - General Biochemistry KW - Genetics and Molecular Biology KW - General Mathematics KW - Immunology KW - General Neuroscience SN - 0092-8240 TI - Relation between the number of peaks and the number of reciprocal sign epistatic interactions VL - 84 ER -