Related papers: Population genetics of gene function
Stochastic phenotype switching has been suggested to play a beneficial role in microbial populations by leading to the division of labour among cells, or ensuring that at least some of the population survives an unexpected change in…
The theory of life history evolution provides a powerful framework to understand the evolutionary dynamics of pathogens in both epidemic and endemic situations. This framework, however, relies on the assumption that pathogen populations are…
Motivated by the wide range of known self-replicating systems, some far from genetics, we study a system composed by individuals having an internal dynamics with many possible states that are partially stable, with varying mutation rates.…
A major aim of evolutionary biology is to explain the respective roles of adaptive versus non-adaptive changes in the evolution of complexity. While selection is certainly responsible for the spread and maintenance of complex phenotypes,…
Phenotypically structured equations arise in population biology to describe the interaction of species with their environment that brings the nutrients. This interaction usually leads to selection of the fittest individuals. Models used in…
Theoretical analysis proves that human survivability is dominated by an unusual physical, rather than biological, mechanism, which yields an exact law. The law agrees with all experimental data, but, contrary to existing theories, it is the…
Conventional population genetics considers the evolution of a limited number of genotypes corresponding to phenotypes with different fitness. As model phenotypes, in particular RNA secondary structure, have become computationally tractable,…
We study the dynamics of an age-structured population in which the life expectancy of an offspring may be mutated with respect to that of its parent. When advantageous mutation is favored, the average fitness of the population grows…
Biological functions are typically performed by groups of cells that express predominantly the same genes, yet display a continuum of phenotypes. While it is known how one genotype can generate such non-genetic diversity, it remains unclear…
Living species, ranging from bacteria to animals, exist in environmental conditions that exhibit spatial and temporal heterogeneity which requires them to adapt. Risk-spreading through spontaneous phenotypic variations is a known concept in…
Biological evolution is realised through the same mechanisms of birth and death that underlie change in population density. The deep interdependence between ecology and evolution is well-established, and recent models focus on integrating…
The ratio of males to females in a population is a meaningful characteristic of sexual species. The reason for this biological property to be available to the observers of nature seems to be a question never asked. Introducing the notion of…
Genetically identical cells in the same population can take on phenotypically variable states, leading to differentiated responses to external signals, such as nutrients and drug-induced stress. Many models and experiments have focused on a…
We analyze the population dynamics of a broad class of fitness functions that exhibit epochal evolution---a dynamical behavior, commonly observed in both natural and artificial evolutionary processes, in which long periods of stasis in an…
Since steep declines in a population's size also typically alter its composition, population bottlenecks are considered highly important for evolution. However, despite such significance, the mechanisms governing the impact of a given…
Population genetics struggles to model extinction; standard models track the relative rather than absolute fitness of genotypes, while the exceptions describe only the short-term transition from imminent doom to evolutionary rescue. But…
When predicting the fate and consequences of recurring deleterious mutations in self-fertilising populations most models developed make the assumption that populations have discrete non-overlapping generations. This makes them biologically…
The concept of fitness as a measure for a species's success in natural selection is central to the theory of evolution. We here investigate how reproduction rates which are not constant but vary in response to environmental fluctuations,…
A simplified model for the growth of a population is studied in which random effects arise because reproducing individuals have a certain probability of surviving until the next breeding season and hence contributing to the next generation.…
In this paper we study a class of stochastic individual-based models that describe the evolution of haploid populations where each individual is characterised by a phenotype and a genotype. The phenotype of an individual determines its…