Related papers: Adaptive evolution of molecular phenotypes
We study the evolutionary dynamics of a maladapted population of self-replicating sequences on strongly correlated fitness landscapes. Each sequence is assumed to be composed of blocks of equal length and its fitness is given by a linear…
The biological theory of adaptive dynamics proposes a description of the long-term evolution of a structured asexual population. It is based on the assumptions of large population, rare mutations and small mutation steps, that lead to a…
We analyze a nonlocal PDE model describing the dynamics of adaptation of a phenotypically structured population, under the effects of mutation and selection, in a changing environment. Previous studies have analyzed the large-time behavior…
Gene expression levels are important molecular quantitative traits that link genotypes to molecular functions and fitness. In Drosophila, population-genetic studies in recent years have revealed substantial adaptive evolution at the genomic…
This is an introductory review of deterministic mutation-selection models for asexual populations (i.e., quasispecies theory) and related topics. First, the basic concepts of fitness, mutations, and sequence space are introduced. Different…
How fast does a population evolve from one fitness peak to another? We study the dynamics of evolving, asexually reproducing populations in which a certain number of mutations jointly confer a fitness advantage. We consider the time until a…
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 study the dynamics of phenotypically structured populations in environments with fluctuations. In particular, using novel arguments from the theories of Hamilton-Jacobi equations with constraints and homogenization, we obtain results…
The regulation of a gene depends on the binding of transcription factors to specific sites located in the regulatory region of the gene. The generation of these binding sites and of cooperativity between them are essential building blocks…
Darwinian evolution can be modeled in general terms as a flow in the space of fitness (i.e. reproductive rate) distributions. In the diffusion approximation, Tsimring et al. have showed that this flow admits "fitness wave" solutions:…
We consider an infinitely large population under stabilising selection and mutation in which the allelic effects determining a polygenic trait vary between loci. We obtain analytical expressions for the stationary genetic variance as a…
In unicellular organisms such as bacteria and in most viruses, mutations mainly occur during reproduction. Thus, genotypes with a high birth rate should have a higher mutation rate. However, standard models of asexual adaptation such as the…
Evolution is simultaneously driven by a number of processes such as mutation, competition and random sampling. Understanding which of these processes is dominating the collective evolutionary dynamics in dependence on system properties is a…
Epochal dynamics, in which long periods of stasis in an evolving population are punctuated by a sudden burst of change, is a common behavior in both natural and artificial evolutionary processes. We analyze the population dynamics for a…
Adaptation in response to selection on polygenic phenotypes may occur via subtle allele frequencies shifts at many loci. Current population genomic techniques are not well posed to identify such signals. In the past decade, detailed…
Frequency dependent selection and demographic fluctuations play important roles in evolutionary and ecological processes. Under frequency dependent selection, the average fitness of the population may increase or decrease based on…
Phenotypes of individuals in a population of organisms are not fixed. Phenotypic fluctuations, which describe temporal variation of the phenotype of an individual or individual-to-individual variation across a population, are present in…
We investigate the evolutionary dynamics of a finite population of sequences adapting to NK fitness landscapes. We find that, unlike in the case of an infinite population, the average fitness in a finite population is maximized at a small…
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…
A macroscopic theory for describing cellular states during steady-growth is presented, which is based on the consistency between cellular growth and molecular replication, as well as the robustness of phenotypes against perturbations.…