Sequence space (evolution)

In evolutionary biology, sequence space is a way of representing all possible sequences (for a protein, gene or genome). The sequence space has one dimension per amino acid or nucleotide in the sequence leading to highly dimensional spaces.

Most sequences in sequence space have no function, leaving relatively small regions that are populated by naturally occurring genes. Each protein sequence is adjacent to all other sequences that can be reached through a single mutation. Evolution can be visualised as the process of sampling nearby sequences in sequence space and moving to any with improved fitness over the current one.

A sequence space is usually laid out as a grid. For protein sequence spaces, each residue in the protein is represented by a dimension with 20 possible positions along that axis corresponding to the possible amino acids. Hence there are 400 possible dipeptides arranged in a 20x20 space but that expands to 10¹³⁰ for even a small protein of 100 amino acids arranges in a space with 100 dimensions. Although such overwhelming multidimensionality cannot be visualised or represented diagrammatically, it provides a useful abstract model to think about the range of proteins and evolution from one sequence to another.

These highly multidimensional spaces can be compressed to 2 or 3 dimensions using principal component analysis. A fitness landscape is simply a sequence space with an extra vertical axis of fitness added for each sequence.

Despite the diversity of protein superfamilies, sequence space is extremely sparsely populated by functional proteins. Most random protein sequences have no fold or function.Enzyme superfamilies, therefore, exist as tiny clusters of active proteins in a vast empty space of non-functional sequence.

The density of functional proteins in sequence space, and the proximity of different functions to one another is a key determinant in understanding evolvability. The degree of interpenetration of two neutral networks of different activities in sequence space will determine how easy it is to evolve from one activity to another. The more overlap between different activities in sequence space, the more cryptic variation for promiscuous activity will be.

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