Related papers: The pattern and distribution of deleterious mutati…
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,…
Textual analysis of typical microbial genomes reveals that they have the statistical characteristics of a DNA sequence of a much shorter length. This peculiar property supports an evolutionary model in which a genome evolves by random…
Our models for detecting the effect of adaptation on population genomic diversity are often predicated on a single newly arisen mutation sweeping rapidly to fixation. However, a population can also adapt to a new situation by multiple…
We study a continuous time model for the frequency distribution of an infinitely large asexual population in which both beneficial and deleterious mutations occur and the fitness is additive. When beneficial mutations are ignored, the exact…
Classical stochastic demography predicts that environmental stochasticity reduces population growth rates and, thereby, can increase extinction risk. In contrast, the SAS-CFF model demonstrates that environmental stochasticity can promote…
How self-incompatibility systems are maintained in plant populations is still a debated issue. Theoretical models predict that self-incompatibility systems break down according to the intensity of inbreeding depression and number of…
Despite increasing data from population-wide sequencing studies, the risk for recessive disorders in consanguineous partnerships is still heavily debated. An important aspect that has not sufficiently been investigated theoretically, is the…
We consider the Moran model of population genetics with two types, mutation, and selection, and investigate the line of descent of a randomly-sampled individual from a contemporary population. We trace this ancestral line back into the…
The commonly observed negative correlation between the number of species in an ecological community and disease risk, typically referred to as "the dilution effect", has received a substantial amount of attention over the past decade.…
Natural populations often show enhanced genetic drift consistent with a strong skew in their offspring number distribution. The skew arises because the variability of family sizes is either inherently strong or amplified by population…
Genetic hitchhiking describes evolution at a neutral locus that is linked to a selected locus. If a beneficial allele rises to fixation at the selected locus, a characteristic polymorphism pattern (so-called selective sweep) emerges at the…
Genetic drift at the frontiers of two-dimensional range expansions of microorganisms can frustrate local cooperation between different genetic variants, demixing the population into distinct sectors. In a biological context, mutualistic or…
We investigate the selective forces that promote the emergence of modularity in nature. We demonstrate the spontaneous emergence of modularity in a population of individuals that evolve in a changing environment. We show that the level of…
The unwelcome evolution of malignancy during cancer progression emerges through a selection process in a complex heterogeneous population structure. In the present work, we investigate evolutionary dynamics in a phenotypically heterogeneous…
The spatial Muller's ratchet is a model introduced by Foutel-Rodier and Etheridge to study the impact of cooperation and competition on the fitness of an expanding asexual population. The model is an interacting particle system consisting…
The sample frequency spectrum (SFS), which describes the distribution of mutant alleles in a sample of DNA sequences, is a widely used summary statistic in population genetics. The expected SFS has a strong dependence on the historical…
By exploiting an analogy between population genetics and statistical mechanics, we study the evolution of a polygenic trait under stabilizing selection, mutation, and genetic drift. This requires us to track only four macroscopic variables,…
This manuscript delves into the intersection of genomics and phenotypic prediction, focusing on the statistical innovation required to navigate the complexities introduced by noisy covariates and confounders. The primary emphasis is on the…
Although mutations drive the evolutionary process, the rates at which the mutations occur are themselves subject to evolutionary forces. Our purpose here is to understand the role of selection and random genetic drift in the evolution of…
The adaptive evolution of large asexual populations is generally characterized by competition between clones carrying different beneficial mutations. This interference phenomenon slows down the adaptation speed and makes the theoretical…