Related papers: The look-ahead effect of phenotypic mutations
We consider a trait-structured population subject to mutation, birth and competition of logistic type, where the number of coexisting types may fluctuate. Applying a limit of rare mutations to this population while keeping the population…
Cancer progression is an example of a rapid adaptive process where evolving new traits is essential for survival and requires a high mutation rate. Precancerous cells acquire a few key mutations that drive rapid population growth and…
Multiple phenotypic states often arise in a single cell with different gene-expression states that undergo transcription regulation with positive feedback. Recent experiments have shown that at least in E. coli, the gene state switching can…
Developmental trajectories are known to be canalized, or robust to both environmental and genetic perturbations. However, even when these trajectories are decanalized by an environmental perturbation outside of the range of conditions to…
Heterogeneous adoption thresholds exist widely in social contagions, but were always neglected in previous studies. We first propose a non-Markovian spreading threshold model with general adoption threshold distribution. In order to…
The contribution to an organism's phenotype from one genetic locus may depend upon the status of other loci. Such epistatic interactions among loci are now recognized as fundamental to shaping the process of adaptation in evolving…
The emergence of acquired drug resistance in cancer represents a major barrier to treatment success. While research has traditionally focused on genetic sources of resistance, recent findings suggest that cancer cells can acquire transient…
Selection, mutation and random drift affect the dynamics of allele frequencies and consequently of quantitative traits. While the macroscopic dynamics of quantitative traits can be measured, the underlying allele frequencies are typically…
Is evolution always gradual or can it make leaps? We examine a mathematical model of an evolutionary process on a fitness landscape and obtain analytic solutions for the probability of multi-mutation leaps, that is, several mutations…
Although a number of studies have shown that natural and laboratory populations initially well-adapted to their environment can evolve rapidly when conditions suddenly change, the dynamics of rapid adaptation are not well understood. Here a…
Evolution on neutral networks of genotypes has been found in models to concentrate on genotypes with high mutational robustness, to a degree determined by the topology of the network. Here analysis is generalized beyond neutral networks to…
We examine birth--death processes with state dependent transition probabilities and at least one absorbing boundary. In evolution, this describes selection acting on two different types in a finite population where reproductive events occur…
Linear mixed models (LMMs) are a powerful and established tool for studying genotype-phenotype relationships. A limiting assumption of LMMs is that the residuals are Gaussian distributed, a requirement that rarely holds in practice.…
Intraspecific trait variation has been increasingly recognized as an important factor in determining species interaction and diversity. Eco-evolutionary models have studied the distribution of trait values within a population that changes…
Because mutations are mostly deleterious, mutation rates should be reduced by natural selection. However, mutations also provide the raw material for adaptation. Therefore, evolutionary theory suggests that the mutation rate must balance…
Phenotypes of individuals in a population of organisms are not fixed. Phenotypic fluctuations, which describe temporal variation of the phenotype of an individual or individual-to-individual variation across a population, are present in…
While Neutral Theory famously describes the number of discrete genetic differences in populations, we consider the number of genetic backgrounds under which such differences are observed - setting limits to the generalizability of their…
This paper pursues the insight that language models naturally enable an intelligent variation operator similar in spirit to evolutionary crossover. In particular, language models of sufficient scale demonstrate in-context learning, i.e.…
The selection pressures that have shaped the evolution of complex traits in humans remain largely unknown, and in some contexts highly contentious, perhaps above all where they concern mean trait differences among groups. To date, the…
Understanding how genes influence phenotype across species is a fundamental challenge in genetic engineering, which will facilitate advances in various fields such as crop breeding, conservation biology, and personalized medicine. However,…