Directional epistasis is common in morphological divergence

Epistasis is often portrayed as unimportant in evolution. While random patterns of epistasis may have limited effects on the response to selection, systematic directional epistasis can have substantial effects on evolutionary dynamics. Directional epistasis occurs when allelic substitutions that change a trait also modify the effects of allelic substitutions at other loci in a systematic direction. In this case, trait evolution may induce correlated changes in allelic effects and effective genetic variance (evolvability) that modify further evolution. Although theory thus suggests a potentially important role for directional epistasis in evolution, we still lack empirical evidence about its prevalence and magnitude. Using a new framework to estimate systematic patterns of epistasis from line-crosses experiments, we quantify its effects on 197 size-related traits from diverging natural populations in 24 animal and 17 plant species. We show that directional epistasis is common and tends t..., The data were collected through a literature search., , # Directional epistasis is common in morphological divergence

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.66t1g1k7m](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.66t1g1k7m)

This folder contains four data files used for the paper \"Directional epistasis is common in morphological divergence\".

## Description of the data and file structure

### Dataset – epistasis.csv

This dataset is the raw dataset used in the study \"Directional epistasis is common in morphological divergence\". The data in this file are not the product of any analysis, they are the results of our literature search. Each row corresponds to one trait. The naming of each derivate follows the diagram \"Reciprocal line-cross explanation.pdf\". Empty cells indicate the data could not be found.

Study ID : identification name of the study used in our analysis
ID trait : identification number of the trait used in our analysis
Taxa : taxa involved in the line-cross experiment
Cross.type : type of line-cross ; either inter-species or intra-species
Character....