Positive genetic interactions: high impact, but underrepresented in the literature
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Abstract
Genetic interactions reveal functional relationships between genes and are classified as negative or positive. Negative interactions typically link genes with similar functional annotations, while positive interactions are often viewed as less informative and typically link genes that are less obviously related. Integrating yeast genetic interaction data with literature and citation metrics, we find that positive interactions are consistently associated with higher scientific impact yet remain underrepresented in the literature.
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Rather than separating by positive and negative interactions, the “innovativeness” of genetic interactions might better be described by how unexpected the fitness of the double mutants is relative to the multiplicative outcome of the singles…so the strength of their interactions in either direction. Information theoretic metrics like mutual information or KL divergence could be informative here. I’d be interested to see if the more surprising/unexpected interactions that actually confer greater information gain are perceived as interesting or impactful by the scientific community based on citations in the literature.
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