Related papers: Adaptation through stochastic switching into trans…
Biofilm infections on medical implants are difficult to eradicate because insufficient nutrient availability promotes antibiotic-tolerant persister cells that survive treatment and reseed growth. Existing mathematical models usually omit…
The mutation-selection mechanism of Darwinian evolution gives rise not only to adaptation to environmental conditions but also to the enhancement of robustness against mutations. When two or more phenotypes have the same fitness value, the…
Character evolution that affects ecological community interactions often occurs contemporaneously with temporal changes in population size, potentially altering the very nature of those dynamics. Such eco-evolutionary processes may be most…
The emergence of complex patterns of organization close to the Cambrian boundary is known to have happened over a (geologically) short period of time. It involved the rapid diversification of body plans and stands as one of the major…
In this paper we consider a microscopic model of a simple ecosystem. The basic ingredients of this model are individuals, and both the phenotypic and genotypic levels are taken in account. The model is based on a long range cellular…
Background: The accumulation of deleterious mutations of a population directly contributes to the fate as to how long the population would exist, a process often described as Muller's ratchet with the absorbing phenomenon. The key to…
Genetic drift is stochastic fluctuations of alleles frequencies in a population due to sampling effects. We consider a model of drift in an equilibrium population, with high mutation rates: few functional mutations per generation. Such…
We study the adaptive dynamics of predator-prey systems modeled by a dynamical system in which the traits of predators and prey are allowed to evolve by small mutations. When only the prey are allowed to evolve, and the size of the…
The forest of mutations associated to a multitype branching forest is obtained by merging together all vertices of its clusters and by preserving connections between them. We first show that the forest of mutations of any mulitype branching…
The process of evolutionary emergence of purposeful adaptive behavior is investigated by means of computer simulations. The model proposed implies that there is an evolving population of simple agents, which have two natural needs: energy…
Crossover and mutation are the two main operators that lead to new solutions in evolutionary approaches. In this article, a new method of performing the crossover phase is presented. The problem of choice is evolutionary decision tree…
We examine the feasibility of predicting and subsequently managing the future evolution of a Complex Adaptive System. Our archetypal system mimics a competitive population of mechanical, biological, informational or human objects. We show…
This paper concerns applications of genetic algorithms and genetic programming to tasks for which it is difficult to find a representation that does not map to a highly complex and discontinuous fitness landscape. In such cases the standard…
How fast does a population evolve from one fitness peak to another? We study the dynamics of evolving, asexually reproducing populations in which a certain number of mutations jointly confer a fitness advantage. We consider the time until a…
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…
The accumulation of deleterious mutations is driven by rare fluctuations which lead to the loss of all mutation free individuals, a process known as Muller's ratchet. Even though Muller's ratchet is a paradigmatic process in population…
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…
The accumulation of adaptive mutations is essential for survival in novel environments. However, in clonal populations with a high mutational supply, the power of natural selection is expected to be limited. This is due to clonal…
Linked beneficial and deleterious mutations are known to decrease the fixation probability of a favorable mutation in large asexual populations. While the hindering effect of strongly deleterious mutations on adaptive evolution has been…
Mechanisms of immunity, and of the host-pathogen interactions in general are among the most fundamental problems of medicine, ecology, and evolution studies. Here, we present a microscopic, protein-level, sequence-based model of immune…