Related papers: Evolution of the Age Structured Populations and De…
The rapid development of sequencing technologies represents new opportunities for population genetics research. It is expected that genomic data will increase our ability to reconstruct the history of populations. While this increase in…
Predicting the adaptation of populations to a changing environment is crucial to assess the impact of human activities on biodiversity. Many theoretical studies have tackled this issue by modeling the evolution of quantitative traits…
Population genetic studies have found evidence for dramatic population growth in recent human history. It is unclear how this recent population growth, combined with the effects of negative natural selection, has affected patterns of…
A stochastic genetic model for biological aging is introduced bridging the gap between the bit-string Penna model and the Pletcher-Neuhauser approach. The phenomenon of exponentially increasing mortality function at intermediate ages and…
Various features of the development of individual living species, including individual humans, are programmed. Is death also programmed, and if yes, how is it implemented and what can be the underlying mechanism providing the inevitability…
The Gompertz model since 1825 has significantly contributed to interpretation of ageing in biological and social sciences. However, in modern research findings, it is clear that the Gompertz model is not successful to describe the whole…
We consider two versions of stochastic population models with mutation and selection. The first approach relies on a multitype branching process; here, individuals reproduce and change type (i.e., mutate) independently of each other,…
The population size has far-reaching effects on the fitness of the population, that, in its turn influences the population extinction or persistence. Understanding the density- and age-dependent factors will facilitate more accurate…
Since steep declines in a population's size also typically alter its composition, population bottlenecks are considered highly important for evolution. However, despite such significance, the mechanisms governing the impact of a given…
Evolutionary branching is analysed in a stochastic, individual-based population model under mutation and selection. In such models, the common assumption is that individual reproduction and life career are characterised by values of a…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
We introduce a population dynamics model, where individual genomes are represented by bit-strings. Selection is described by death probabilities which depend on these genomes, and new individuals continuously replace the ones that die,…
We study the effect of mutations in a simple model of colonization, based on Montecarlo simulations. When the population colonizes the whole available habitat, a maximum population density is reached, which depends on the mutation rate.…
Cellular senescence is thought to play a major role in age-related diseases, which cause nearly 67% of all human deaths worldwide. Recent research in mice showed that exercising mice had higher levels of telomerase, an enzyme that helps…
The catastrophic senescence of the Pacific salmon is among the initial tests used to validate the Penna aging model. Based on the mutation accumulation theory, the sudden decrease in fitness following reproduction may be solely attributed…
We build upon our previous analytical results for the Penna model of senescence to include positive mutations. We investigate whether a small but non-zero positive mutation rate gives qualitatively different results to the traditional Penna…
Assuming the deleterious mutations in the Penna ageing model to affect mainly the young ages, we get an enhanced mortality at very young age, followed by a minimum of the mortality, and then the usual exponential increase of mortality with…
Textual analysis of typical microbial genomes reveals that they have the statistical characteristics of a DNA sequence of a much shorter length. This peculiar property supports an evolutionary model in which a genome evolves by random…
We removed from the Penna model for biological ageing any random killing Verhulst factor. Deaths are due only to genetic diseases and the population size is fixed, instead of fluctuating around some constant value. We show that these…
Within the framework of population genetics we consider the evolution of an asexual haploid population under the effect of a rapidly varying natural selection (microevolution). We focus on the case in which the environment exerting…