PREreview of Comprehensive analysis of gene regulatory dynamics, fitness landscape, and population evolution during sexual reproduction

The paper provides a thoroughly developed technique to relate gene expression dynamics to fitness landscapes and comment on the survivability of a population reproducing either by sexual or asexual mode. The authors use Gene Regulatory Networks (GRNs) to define continuous and measurable genetic parameters. The steady state expression of these genes lead to seven distinct phenotypes. Genetic expression level at steady state was converted into a boolean value and the fitness was assumed to take the maximal value at either 0 or 1, i.e the fitness was assumed to depend monotonically at the combination of each expression level. The fitness value was mapped from this boolean input to a continuous function outputting fitness values. By evolving populations on these different fitness landscapes, via two modes of reproduction, they obtained distributions of populations on the fitness landscapes, which were regionalised into convex polygons when the mode of evolution was sexual. This convex regionalisation suggests speciation in the populations. 

Major comments

1. The model provides a comprehensive theoretical insight however, fails to support with experimental results

2. Figure 6 seems quite unclear in explaining the sexual reproduction mode adopted in the simulations. How exactly are the transfer of genetic parameters is carried out is quite unclear. 

Minor comments

1. There are some typographical errors in the manuscript.

Competing interests

The author declares that they have no competing interests.