A unified framework for measuring selection on cellular lineages and traits.

Intracellular states probed by gene expression profiles and metabolic activities are intrinsically noisy, causing phenotypic variations among cellular lineages. Understanding the adaptive and evolutionary roles of such variations requires clarifying their linkage to population growth rates. Extending a cell lineage statistics framework, here we show that a population's growth rate can be expanded by the cumulants of a fitness landscape that characterize how fitness distributes in a population.