Related papers: Switching between phenotypes and population extinc…
A branching process in varying environment with generation-dependent immigration is a modification of the standard branching process in which immigration is allowed and the reproduction and immigration laws may vary over the generations.…
Understanding under what conditions interacting populations, whether they be plants, animals, or viral particles, coexist is a question of theoretical and practical importance in population biology. Both biotic interactions and…
We have analyzed the relations between the mutational pressure, recombination and selection pressure in the bit-string model with sexual reproduction. For specific sets of these parameters we have found three phase transitions with one…
Two species with similar resource requirements respond in a characteristic way to variations in their habitat -- their abundances rise and fall in concert. We use this idea to learn how bacterial populations in the microbiota respond to…
Predicting evolution of expanding populations is critical to control biological threats such as invasive species and cancer metastasis. Expansion is primarily driven by reproduction and dispersal, but nature abounds with examples of…
Population dynamics reflects an underlying birth-death process, where the rates associated with different events may depend on external environmental conditions and on the population density. A whole family of simple and popular…
It has long been known that antibiotic treatment will not completely kill off a bacteria population. For many species a small fraction of bacteria is not sensitive to antibiotics. These bacteria are said to persist. Recently it has been…
We study diffusion-controlled two-species annihilation with a finite number of particles. In this stochastic process, particles move diffusively, and when two particles of opposite type come into contact, the two annihilate. We focus on the…
Consider a supercritical branching random walk in a time-inhomogeneous random environment. We impose a selection (called barrier) on survival in the following way. The position of the barrier may depend on the generation and the…
Recent methodological advances are enabling better examination of speciation and extinction processes and patterns. A major open question is the origin of large discrepancies in species number between groups of the same age. Existing…
Populations of competing biological species exhibit a fascinating interplay between the nonlinear dynamics of evolutionary selection forces and random fluctuations arising from the stochastic nature of the interactions. The processes…
We consider a simple stochastic model for the spread of a disease caused by two virus strains in a closed homogeneously mixing population of size N. The spread of each strain in the absence of the other one is described by the stochastic…
We study a minimal model for the growth of a phenotypically heterogeneous population of cells subject to a fluctuating environment in which they can replicate (by exploiting available resources) and modify their phenotype within a given…
Bet-hedging is a phenotype diversification strategy that combines a fast-growing vulnerable phenotype with a slow-growing resistant phenotype. In environments switching between favorable and unfavorable conditions, bet-hedging optimizes…
In genetic circuits, when the mRNA lifetime is short compared to the cell cycle, proteins are produced in geometrically-distributed bursts, which greatly affects the cellular switching dynamics between different metastable phenotypic…
Consider a population whose size changes stepwise by its members reproducing or dying (disappearing), but is otherwise quite general. Denote the initial (non-random) size by $Z_0$ and the size of the $n$th change by $C_n$, $n= 1, 2,…
Physiological stress fundamentally alters disease susceptibility in aquatic environments. In this paper, we develop a stress-structured epidemiological model where host vulnerability is dynamically driven by water quality. Analytically, we…
We study individual-based dynamics in finite populations, subject to randomly switching environmental conditions. These are inspired by models in which genes transition between on and off states, regulating underlying protein dynamics.…
To study later spatial evolutionary games based on the multitype contact process, we first focus in this paper on the conditions for survival/extinction in the presence of only one strategy, in which case our model consists of a variant of…
Statistical physics can describe the behavior of microbial populations consisting of many heterogeneous individuals. A direct consequence is the existence of phase transitions, where the behavior of a population changes discontinuously upon…