Related papers: Evolutionary accessibility of mutational pathways
We study the evolution of large but finite asexual populations evolving in fitness landscapes in which all mutations are either neutral or strongly deleterious. We demonstrate that despite the absence of higher fitness genotypes, adaptation…
The fitness landscape defines the relationship between genotypes and fitness in a given environment, and underlies fundamental quantities such as the distribution of selection coefficient, or the magnitude and type of epistasis. A better…
We study adaptation of a haploid asexual population on a fitness landscape defined over binary genotype sequences of length $L$. We consider greedy adaptive walks in which the population moves to the fittest among all single mutant…
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:…
Due to stochastic fluctuations arising from finite population size, known as genetic drift, the ability of a population to explore a rugged fitness landscape depends on its size. In the weak mutation regime, while the mean steady-state…
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…
Fisher's geometric model was originally introduced to argue that complex adaptations must occur in small steps because of pleiotropic constraints. When supplemented with the assumption of additivity of mutational effects on phenotypic…
Adaptation is a central topic in theoretical biology, of practical importance for analyzing drug resistance mutations. Several authors have used arguments based on extreme value theory in their work on adaptation. There are complications…
Genotypic fitness landscapes are constructed by assessing the fitness of all possible combinations of a given number of mutations. In the last years, several experimental fitness landscapes have been completely resolved. As fitness…
Both evolution and ecology have long been concerned with the impact of variable environmental conditions on observed levels of genetic diversity within and between species. We model the evolution of a quantitative trait under selection that…
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…
Evolution on neutral networks of genotypes has been found in models to concentrate on genotypes with high mutational robustness, to a degree determined by the topology of the network. Here analysis is generalized beyond neutral networks to…
We consider the adaptation dynamics of an asexual population that walks uphill on a rugged fitness landscape which is endowed with large number of local fitness peaks. We work in a parameter regime where only those mutants that are single…
The nature of epistasis has important consequences for the evolutionary significance of sex and recombination. Recent efforts to find negative epistasis as source of negative linkage disequilibrium and associated long-term sex advantage…
We study the adaptation dynamics of a maladapted asexual population on rugged fitness landscapes with many local fitness peaks. The distribution of beneficial fitness effects is assumed to belong to one of the three extreme value domains,…
Robustness, the insensitivity of some of a biological system's functionalities to a set of distinct conditions, is intimately linked to fitness. Recent studies suggest that it may also play a vital role in enabling the evolution of species.…
Proteins evolve through complex sequence spaces, with fitness landscapes serving as a conceptual framework that links sequence to function. Fitness landscapes can be smooth, where multiple similarly accessible evolutionary paths are…
One essential ingredient of evolutionary theory is the concept of fitness as a measure for a species' success in its living conditions. Here, we quantify the effect of environmental fluctuations onto fitness by analytical calculations on a…
Evolution in changing environments is an important, but little studied aspect of the theory of evolution. The idea of adaptive walks in fitness landscapes has triggered a vast amount of research and has led to many important insights about…
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…