The origin of life is believed to have progressed through an RNA world, in which RNA acted as both genetic material and functional molecules. The structure of the evolutionary fitness landscape of RNA would determine natural selection for the first functional sequences. Fitness landscapes are the subject of much speculation, but their structure is essentially unknown. Here we describe a comprehensive map of a fitness landscape, exploring nearly all of sequence space, for short RNAs surviving selection in vitro. With the exception of a small evolutionary network, we find that fitness peaks are largely isolated from one another, highlighting the importance of historical contingency and indicating that natural selection would be constrained to local exploration in the RNA world.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 14. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 25 October 2015.
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#3,409,614
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Outputs from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
#36,246
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Outputs of similar age from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
#378
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Altmetric has tracked 34,400,738 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 90th percentile: it's in the top 10% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 118,992 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 40.1. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 69% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 245,203 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done well, scoring higher than 89% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 910 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 58% of its contemporaries.
