Related papers: The inevitability of unconditionally deleterious s…

Most new mutations are deleterious and are eventually eliminated by natural selection. But in an adapting population, the rapid amplification of beneficial mutations can hinder the removal of deleterious variants in nearby regions of the…

We investigate the effect of spatial range expansions on the evolution of fitness when beneficial and deleterious mutations co-segregate. We perform individual-based simulations of a uniform linear habitat and complement them with…

Selection in a time-periodic environment is modeled via the continuous-time two-player replicator dynamics, which for symmetric pay-offs reduces to the Fisher equation of mathematical genetics. For a sufficiently rapid and cyclic…

We study the stationary state of a population evolving under the action of random genetic drift, selection and recombination in which both deleterious and reverse beneficial mutations can occur. We find that the equilibrium fraction of…

Most non-synonymous mutations are thought to be deleterious because of their effect on protein sequence. These polymorphisms are expected to be removed or kept at low frequency by the action of natural selection, and rare deleterious…

When mutation rates are low, natural selection remains effective, and increasing the mutation rate can give rise to an increase in adaptation rate. When mutation rates are high to begin with, however, increasing the mutation rate may have a…

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…

The adaptation rate in theoretical models of biological evolution increases with the mutation rate but only to a point when mutations into lethal states cause extinction. One would expect that removing such states should be beneficial for…

The accumulation of deleterious mutations is driven by rare fluctuations which lead to the loss of all mutation free individuals, a process known as Muller's ratchet. Even though Muller's ratchet is a paradigmatic process in population…

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…

The vast majority of mutations are deleterious, and are eliminated by purifying selection. Yet in finite asexual populations, purifying selection cannot completely prevent the accumulation of deleterious mutations due to Muller's ratchet:…

A common view in evolutionary biology is that mutation rates are minimised. However, studies in combinatorial optimisation and search have shown a clear advantage of using variable mutation rates as a control parameter to optimise the…

Many theoretical and experimental studies suggest that range expansions can have severe consequences for the gene pool of the expanding population. Due to strongly enhanced genetic drift at the advancing frontier, neutral and weakly…

Linked beneficial and deleterious mutations are known to decrease the fixation probability of a favorable mutation in large asexual populations. While the hindering effect of strongly deleterious mutations on adaptive evolution has been…

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…

In this paper, we discuss the fitness landscape evolution of permanent replicator systems using a hypothesis that the specific time of evolutionary adaptation of the system parameters is much slower than the time of internal evolutionary…

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…

Muller's ratchet describes the irreversible accumulation of deleterious mutations in asexual populations. In well-mixed populations the speed of fitness decline is exponentially small in the population size, and any positive rate of…

Competition between independently arising beneficial mutations is enhanced in spatial populations due to the linear rather than exponential growth of clones. Recent theoretical studies have pointed out that the resulting fitness dynamics is…

We investigate the fitness advantage associated with the robustness of a phenotype against deleterious mutations using deterministic mutation-selection models of quasispecies type equipped with a mesa shaped fitness landscape. We obtain…