Related papers: Genetic drift at expanding frontiers promotes gene…

The distributed genome hypothesis states that the set of genes in a population of bacteria is distributed over all individuals that belong to the specific taxon. It implies that certain genes can be gained and lost from generation to…

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…

In this paper, we study the scaling limit of a class of random walks which behave like simple random walks outside of a bounded region around the origin and which are subject to a partial reflection near the origin. If the probability of…

Community assembly is studied using individual-based multispecies models. The models have stochastic population dynamics with mutation, migration, and extinction of species. Mutants appear as a result of mutation of the resident species,…

We study the effect of spatial structure, genetic drift, mutation, and selective pressure on the evolutionary dynamics in a simplified model of asexual organisms colonizing a new territory. Under an appropriate coarse-graining, the…

Biological cells replicate their genomes in a well-planned manner. The DNA replication program of an organism determines the timing at which different genomic regions are replicated, with fundamental consequences for cell homeostasis and…

When a collection of phenotypically diverse organisms compete with each other for limited resources, with competition being strongest amongst the most similar, the population can evolve into tightly localised clusters. This process can be…

Recurrent mutations are a common phenomenon in population genetics. They may be at the origin of the fixation of a new genotype, if they give a phenotypic advantage to the carriers of the new mutation. In this paper, we are interested in…

With the development of high throughput sequencing technology, it becomes possible to directly analyze mutation distribution in a genome-wide fashion, dissociating mutation rate measurements from the traditional underlying assumptions.…

Antagonistic interactions in biological systems, which occur when one perturbation blunts the effect of another, are typically interpreted as evidence that the two perturbations impact the same cellular pathway or function. Yet, this…

The process of `Evolutionary Diffusion', i.e. reproduction with local mutation but without selection in a biological population, resembles standard Diffusion in many ways. However, Evolutionary Diffusion allows the formation of local peaks…

Microbial communities are ubiquitous in nature and come in a multitude of forms, ranging from communities dominated by a handful of species to communities containing a wide variety of metabolically distinct organisms. This huge range in…

It is widely accepted that population genetics theory is the cornerstone of evolutionary analyses. Empirical tests of the theory, however, are challenging because of the complex relationships between space, dispersal, and evolution.…

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…

We study a stochastic model proposed recently in the genetic literature to explain the heterogeneity of cell populations or of gene products. Cells are located in two colonies, whose sizes fluctuate as birth and migration processes in…

Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. In stochastic descriptions of evolutionary dynamics, such as the Moran process, individuals are chosen randomly for birth and for death. If the same type is chosen for both steps,…

Traveling waves describe diverse natural phenomena from crystal growth in physics to range expansions in biology. Two classes of waves exist with very different properties: pulled and pushed. Pulled waves are driven by high growth rates at…

Geographic isolation is a central mechanism of speciation, but perfect isolation of populations is rare. Although speciation can be hindered if gene flow is large, intermediate levels of migration can enhance speciation by introducing…

We raise the hypothesis that the density fluctuations field which originates the growth of large scale structures is a combination of two or more distributions. By applying the statistical analysis of finite mixture distributions to a…

The spread of synthetic gene drives is often discussed in the context of panmictic populations connected by gene flow and described with simple deterministic models. Under such assumptions, an entire species could be altered by releasing a…