Related papers: Quasispecies Theory for Horizontal Gene Transfer a…
Identifying and quantifying the benefits of sex and recombination is a long standing problem in evolutionary theory. In particular, contradictory claims have been made about the existence of a benefit of recombination on high dimensional…
Models for viral populations with high replication error rates (such as RNA viruses) rely on the quasispecies concept, in which mutational pressure beyond the so-called "Error Threshold" leads to a loss of essential genetic information and…
A quasispecies evolving on a fitness landscape with a single peak of fluctuating height is studied. In the approximation that back mutations can be ignored, the rate equations can be solved analytically. It is shown that the error threshold…
We present a mathematical simplification for the evolutionary dynamics of a heritable trait within a two-sex population. This trait is assumed to control the timing of sex-specific life-history events, such as the age of sexual maturity and…
This theory seeks to define species and to explore evolutionary forces and genetic elements in speciation and species maintenance. The theory explains how speciation and species maintenance are caused by natural selection acting on…
We consider the evolution of populations under the joint action of mutation and differential reproduction, or selection. The population is modelled as a finite-type Markov branching process in continuous time, and the associated…
The drift-barrier hypothesis states that random genetic drift constrains the refinement of a phenotype under natural selection. The influence of effective population size and the genome-wide deleterious mutation rate were studied…
We investigate Eigen's model for the evolution of the genetic code of microorganisms using a novel method based on population dynamics analysis. This model, for a given number of offspring, determines long-term survival as a function of the…
It is now well documented that genetic covariance between functionally related traits leads to an uneven distribution of genetic variation across multivariate trait combinations, and possibly a large part of phenotype-space that is…
We study the role of recombination, as practiced by genetically-competent bacteria, in speeding up Darwinian evolution. This is done by adding a new process to a previously-studied Markov model of evolution on a smooth fitness landscape;…
The relationship between genotype and phenotype plays a crucial role in determining the function and robustness of biological systems. Here the evolution progresses through the change in genotype, whereas the selection is based on the…
We consider the evolutionary trajectories traced out by an infinite population undergoing mutation-selection dynamics in static, uncorrelated random fitness landscapes. Starting from the population that consists of a single genotype, the…
We describe a stochastic birth-and-death model of evolution of horizontally transferred genes in microbial populations. The model is a generalization of the stochastic model described by Berg and Kurland and includes five parameters: the…
We introduce a new parameter to discuss the behavior of a genetic algorithm. This parameter is the mean number of exact copies of the best fit chromosomes from one generation to the next. We argue that the genetic algorithm should operate…
Migrations have played an important role in shaping the genetic diversity of human populations. Understanding genomic data thus requires careful modeling of historical gene flow. Here we consider the effect of relatively recent population…
In this paper, we study the equilibrium behavior of Eigen's quasispecies equations for an arbitrary gene network. We consider a genome consisting of $ N $ genes, so that each gene sequence $ \sigma $ may be written as $ \sigma = \sigma_1…
We investigate the interplay between two fundamental mechanisms of microbial population dynamics and evolution called dormancy and horizontal gene transfer. The corresponding traits come in many guises and are ubiquitous in microbial…
We discuss a population of sequences subject to mutations and frequency-dependent selection, where the fitness of a sequence depends on the composition of the entire population. This type of dynamics is crucial to understand the evolution…
We reconsider the Eigen's quasi-species model for competing self-reproductive macromolecules in populations characterized by a single-peaked fitness landscape. The use of ideas and tools borrowed from polymers theory and statistical…
We show that the Tangled Nature model can be interpreted as a general formulation of the quasi-species model by Eigen et al. in a frequency dependent fitness landscape. We present a detailed theoretical derivation of the mutation threshold,…