Related papers: Evolutionary accessibility of mutational pathways
Adaptation of asexual populations is driven by beneficial mutations and therefore the dynamics of this process, besides other factors, depend on the distribution of beneficial fitness effects. It is known that on uncorrelated fitness…
The diversity and quality of natural systems have been a puzzle and inspiration for communities studying artificial life. It is now widely admitted that the adaptation mechanisms enabling these properties are largely influenced by the…
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…
Population structure can be modelled by evolutionary graphs, which can have a substantial, but very subtle influence on the fate of the arising mutants. Individuals are located on the nodes of these graphs, competing with each other to…
Body size or mass is one of the main factors underlying food webs structure. A large number of evolutionary models have shown that indeed, the adaptive evolution of body size (or mass) can give rise to hierarchically organised trophic…
Fitness landscapes are a useful concept to study the dynamics of meta-heuristics. In the last two decades, they have been applied with success to estimate the optimization power of several types of evolutionary algorithms, including genetic…
The structure and function of a protein are determined by its amino acid sequence. While random mutations change a protein's sequence, evolutionary forces shape its structural fold and biological activity. Studies have shown that neutral…
Homologous recombination is an important operator in the evolution of biological organisms. However, there is still no clear, generally accepted understanding of why it exists and under what circumstances it is useful. In this paper we…
How to define and use the concept of inclusive fitness is a contentious topic in evolutionary theory. Inclusive fitness can be used to calculate selection on a focal gene, but it is also applied to whole organisms. Individuals are then…
Recent microbial experiments suggest that enhanced genetic drift at the frontier of a two-dimensional range expansion can cause genetic sectoring patterns with fractal domain boundaries. Here, we propose and analyze a simple model of…
We consider a fitness-structured population model with competition and migration between nearest neighbors. Under a combination of large population and rare migration limits we are particularly interested in the asymptotic behavior of the…
We consider an asexually reproducing population on a finite type space whose evolution is driven by exponential birth, death and competition rates, as well as the possibility of mutation at a birth event. On the individual-based level this…
An accessibility graph of a network contains a link, wherever there is a path of arbitrary length between two nodes. We generalize the concept of accessibility to temporal networks. Building an accessibility graph by consecutively adding…
Resource are often not uniformly distributed within a population. Spatial variations of concentration of a resource, change the fitness of competing strategies locally. The notion of fitness varying with respect to both genotype and…
Sewall Wright's adaptive landscape metaphor penetrates a significant part of evolutionary thinking. Supplemented with Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection and Kimura's maximum principle, it provides a unifying and intuitive…
Several growth models have been proposed in the literature for scale-free complex networks, with a range of fitness-based attachment models gaining prominence recently. However, the processes by which such fitness-based attachment behaviour…
Predicting fitness of biologically-active populations, communities or systems in fluctuating environments is a long-standing challenge. Phenotypic plasticity and bet-hedging strategy, two key evolutionary traits living systems harness to…
We study the adaptation dynamics of an initially maladapted asexual population with genotypes represented by binary sequences of length $L$. The population evolves in a maximally rugged fitness landscape with a large number of local optima.…
In considering evolution of transcribed regions, regulatory modules, and other genomic loci of interest, we are often faced with a situation in which the number of allelic states greatly exceeds the population size. In this limit, the…
The emerging field of high-throughput compartmentalized in vitro evolution is a promising new approach to protein engineering. In these experiments, libraries of mutant genotypes are randomly distributed and expressed in microscopic…