Related papers: Genetic drift at expanding frontiers promotes gene…
The impact of environmental fluctuation on species diversity is studied with a model of the evolutionary ecology of microorganisms. We show that environmental fluctuation induces evolutionary branching and assures the consequential…
Evolutionary dynamics and patterns of molecular evolution are strongly influenced by selection on linked regions of the genome, but our quantitative understanding of these effects remains incomplete. Recent work has focused on predicting…
Dispersal of species is a fundamental ecological process in the evolution and maintenance of biodiversity. Limited control over ecological parameters has hindered progress in understanding of what enables species to colonise new area, as…
The accumulation of beneficial mutations on many competing genetic backgrounds in rapidly adapting populations has a striking impact on evolutionary dynamics. This effect, known as clonal interference, causes erratic fluctuations in the…
A major aim of evolutionary biology is to explain the respective roles of adaptive versus non-adaptive changes in the evolution of complexity. While selection is certainly responsible for the spread and maintenance of complex phenotypes,…
We study a general setting of neutral evolution in which the population is of finite, constant size and can have spatial structure. Mutation leads to different genetic types ("traits"), which can be discrete or continuous. Under minimal…
In genetic drift of small population, it is well known that even when the ratio of alleles is 0.5, specific genes are fixed in or disappear from the population. It seems the reason why inbreeding is avoided. On the other hand, this…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. It is well known that population structure can affect evolutionary dynamics. Traditionally, natural selection is studied between mutants that differ in reproductive rate, but are…
The outcomes of evolution are determined by which mutations occur and fix. In rapidly adapting microbial populations, this process is particularly hard to predict because lineages with different beneficial mutations often spread…
We investigate the effect of spatial range expansions on the evolution of fitness when beneficial and deleterious mutations co-segregate. We perform individual-based simulations of a uniform linear habitat and complement them with…
The problem of natural selection in dispersal-structured populations consisting of individuals characterized by different diffusion coefficients is studied. The competition between the organisms is taken into account through the assumption…
Identifying drivers of complex traits from the noisy signals of genetic variation obtained from high throughput genome sequencing technologies is a central challenge faced by human geneticists today. We hypothesize that the variants…
Natural populations often show enhanced genetic drift consistent with a strong skew in their offspring number distribution. The skew arises because the variability of family sizes is either inherently strong or amplified by population…
We are interested in populations in which the fitness of different genetic types fluctuates in time and space, driven by temporal and spatial fluctuations in the environment. For simplicity, our population is assumed to be composed of just…
In classical evolutionary theory, genetic variation provides the source of heritable phenotypic variation on which natural selection acts. Against this classical view, several theories have emphasized that developmental variability and…
The ways in which natural selection can allow the proliferation of cooperative behavior have long been seen as a central problem in evolutionary biology. Most of the literature has focused on interactions between pairs of individuals and on…
Living species, ranging from bacteria to animals, exist in environmental conditions that exhibit spatial and temporal heterogeneity which requires them to adapt. Risk-spreading through spontaneous phenotypic variations is a known concept in…
A strong demographic Allee effect in which the expected population growth rate is negative below a certain critical population size can cause high extinction probabilities in small introduced populations. However, many species are…
We explore the connection between evolution and large-deviation theory. To do so, we study evolutionary dynamics in which individuals experience mutations, reproduction, and selection using variants of the Moran model. We show that, in the…
As a population grows, spreading to new environments may favor specialization. In this paper, we introduce and explore a model for specialization at the front of a colony expanding synchronously into new territory. We show through numerical…