English

The fixation time of a strongly beneficial allele in a structured population

Probability 2016-09-02 v4 Populations and Evolution

Abstract

For a beneficial allele which enters a large unstructured population and eventually goes to fixation, it is known that the time to fixation is approximately 2log(α)/α2\log(\alpha)/\alpha for a large selection coefficient α\alpha. For a population that is distributed over finitely many colonies, with migration between these colonies, we detect various regimes of the migration rate μ\mu for which the fixation times have different asymptotics as α\alpha \to \infty. If μ\mu is of order α\alpha, the allele fixes (as in the spatially unstructured case) in time 2log(α)/α\sim 2\log(\alpha)/\alpha. If μ\mu is of order αγ,0γ1\alpha^\gamma, 0\leq \gamma \leq 1, the fixation time is (2+(1γ)Δ)log(α)/α\sim (2 + (1-\gamma)\Delta) \log(\alpha)/\alpha, where Δ\Delta is the number of migration steps that are needed to reach all other colonies starting from the colony where the beneficial allele appeared. If μ=1/log(α)\mu = 1/\log(\alpha), the fixation time is (2+S)log(α)/α\sim (2+S)\log(\alpha)/\alpha, where SS is a random time in a simple epidemic model. The main idea for our analysis is to combine a new moment dual for the process conditioned to fixation with the time reversal in equilibrium of a spatial version of Neuhauser and Krone's ancestral selection graph.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1402.1769,
  title  = {The fixation time of a strongly beneficial allele in a structured population},
  author = {Andreas Greven and Peter Pfaffelhuber and Cornelia Pokalyuk and Anton Wakolbinger},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1402.1769},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

52 pages, 5 figures, revised Proof of Proposition 3.18 and Theorem 2