"mutation path" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use it to refer to any change, development, or transformation from one thing to another, usually in a gradual or evolutionary manner. For example, "The species went through a long mutation path before arriving at its current form."
Studies of particular mutation paths revealed that long disorder might just appear to vanish suddenly (Fig. 3E).
By combining these transitions, we can imagine a mutational path starting from any initial genome size to any final size, in a finite number of mutations.
Molecular evolution that is determined by trade-off and sign-epistasis [ 8] effects may be expected to be constrained to follow a few mutational paths (as mutations are bound to occur in a rather specific temporal order to avoid deleterious intermediate combinations).
Explanations based on constraints begin by demonstrating mutation rates, path-dependence, or other constraints that limit optimality.
Natural selection operates on mutations, making the path of natural selection unpredictable, regardless of how well we understand the underlying principles.
Instead of being restricted to a brute-force algorithm that was limited to a small number of mutations, the shortest path algorithm described here can be used on proteins much larger than the 217 amino acids in AK.
Other limitations of the study were (i) the lack of fitness values in the presence of drugs so that epistatic effects and their consequences could not be compared with and without medication and (ii) the lack of knowledge of the direct path of mutation accumulation including all intermediate mutants.
Allowing double changes (but not yet back mutations), there are 240 total possible paths with one double mutation, and 90 additional possible paths with two double mutations.
According to Griffiths and Tavaré (1995), the set of nonrecombining haplotypes carrying these mutations is identical to a rooted gene tree, and the sequence of mutations corresponds to the path from the haplotype to the common ancestor [the root of the gene tree, see Griffiths and Tavaré (1995) for a detailed discussion].
