Related papers: Speeding up evolutionary search by small fitness f…
Protein evolution involves mutations occurring across a wide range of time scales. In analogy with disordered systems in statistical physics, this dynamical heterogeneity suggests strong correlations between mutations happening at distinct…
Species growing in environments that change in time and space will vary in their abundance across locations, even in the absence of persistent location preferences. Here we quantify this non-equilibrium effect by studying a minimal model of…
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 have developed a mathematical model that captures stress-induced mutagenesis, a fundamental aspect of pathogenic and neoplastic evolutionary dynamics, on the fitness landscape with multiple relevant genetic traits as a high-dimensional…
Growing efforts to measure fitness landscapes in molecular and microbial systems are premised on a tight relationship between landscape topography and evolutionary trajectories. This relationship, however, is far from being straightforward:…
Evolution is a dynamic process. The two classical forces of evolution are mutation and selection. Assuming small mutation rates, evolution can be predicted based solely on the fitness differences between phenotypes. Predicting an…
We compare the speed with which a sexual, respectively an asexual, population is able to respond to a biased selective pressure. Our model focuses on the Weismann hypothesis that the extra variation caused by crossing-over and recombination…
In evolutionary dynamics, a key measure of a mutant trait's success is the probability that it takes over the population given some initial mutant-appearance distribution. This "fixation probability" is difficult to compute in general, as…
Macroevolution is considered as a problem of stochastic dynamics in a system with many competing agents. Evolutionary events (speciations and extinctions) are triggered by fitness records found by random exploration of the agents' fitness…
Organisms modulate their fitness in heterogeneous environments by dispersing. Prior work shows that there is selection against "unconditional" dispersal in spatially heterogeneous environments. "Unconditional" means individuals disperse at…
Many biological systems regulate phenotypic heterogeneity as a fitness-maximising strategy in uncertain and dynamic environments. Analysis of such strategies is typically confined both to a discrete set of environmental conditions, and to a…
Which factors govern the evolution of mutation rates and emergence of species? Here, we address this question using a first principles model of life where population dynamics of asexual organisms is coupled to molecular properties and…
We examine to what extent the tempo and mode of environmental fluctuations matter for the growth of structured populations. The models are switching, linear ordinary differential equations $x'(t)=A(\sigma(\omega t))x(t)$ where…
We consider a nonlocal Fisher-KPP equation that models a population structured in space and in phenotype. The population lives in a heterogeneous periodic environment: the diffusion coefficient, the mutation coefficient and the fitness of…
We re-examine the evolutionary dynamics of RNA secondary structures under directional selection towards an optimum RNA structure. We find that the punctuated equilibria lead to a very slow approach to the optimum, following on average an…
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…
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…
Organisms that exploit different environments may experience a stochastic delay in adjusting their fitness when they switch habitats. We study two species whose fitness is determined by the species composition of the local environment, as…
Biological organisms have to cope with stochastic variations in both the external environment and the internal population dynamics. Theoretical studies and laboratory experiments suggest that population diversification could be an effective…
We introduce a new model of evolution on a fitness landscape possessing a tunable degree of neutrality. The model allows us to study the general properties of molecular species undergoing neutral evolution. We find that a number of…