The fitness effect of mutations across environments: Fisher's geometrical model with multiple optima

When are mutations beneficial in one environment and deleterious in another? More generally, what is the relationship between mutation effects across environments? These questions are crucial to predict adaptation in heterogeneous conditions in a broad sense. Empirical evidence documents various patterns of fitness effects across environments but we still lack a framework to analyze these multivariate data. In this article, we extend Fisher's geometrical model to multiple environments determining distinct peaks. We derive the fitness distribution, in one environment, among mutants with a given fitness in another and the bivariate distribution of random mutants’ fitnesses across two or more environments. The geometry of the phenotype‐fitness landscape is naturally interpreted in terms of fitness trade‐offs between environments. These results may be used to fit/predict empirical distributions or to predict the pattern of adaptation across heterogeneous conditions. As an example, we derive the genomic rate of substitution and of adaptation in a metapopulation divided into two distinct habitats in a high migration regime and show that they depend critically on the geometry of the phenotype‐fitness landscape.