Related papers: Stress-Induced Mutagenesis and Complex Adaptation
Evolution is a dynamic process. The two classical forces of evolution are mutation and selection. Assuming small mutation rates, evolution can be predicted based solely on the fitness differences between phenotypes. Predicting an…
Evolutionary adaptation is the process that increases the fit of a population to the fitness landscape it inhabits. As a consequence, evolutionary dynamics is shaped, constrained, and channeled, by that fitness landscape. Much work has been…
The prevalence of sexual reproduction ("sex") in eukaryotes is an enigma of evolutionary biology. Sex increases genetic variation only tells its long-term superiority in essence. The accumulation of harmful mutations causes an immediate and…
The outcomes of evolution are determined by which mutations occur and fix. In rapidly adapting microbial populations, this process is particularly hard to predict because lineages with different beneficial mutations often spread…
Commonly recognized evolutionarily relevant effects of sexual reproduction include increased diversity, accelerated adaptation, and constrained accumulation of deleterious mutations, along with a secondary effect of species genotype…
Using a lattice model based on Monte Carlo simulations, we study the role of the reproduction pattern on the fate of an evolving population. Each individual is under the selection pressure from the environment and random mutations. The…
The famous "two-fold cost of sex" is really the cost of anisogamy -- why should females mate with males who do not contribute resources to offspring, rather than isogamous partners who contribute equally? In typical anisogamous populations,…
Microbial adaptation to extreme stress, such as starvation, antimicrobial exposure, or freezing often reveals fundamental trade-offs between survival and proliferation. Understanding how populations navigate these trade-offs in fluctuating…
The emergence and maintenance of cooperation has attracted intensive scholarly interest and has been analysed within the framework of evolutionary game theory. The role of innovation, which introduces novel strategies into the population,…
We show that the effect of stress on the reproductive fitness of noisy cell populations can be modelled as first-passage time problem, and demonstrate that even relatively short-lived fluctuations in gene expression can ensure long-term…
We examine the evolutionary basis for risk aversion with respect to aggregate risk. We study populations in which agents face choices between alternatives with different levels of aggregate risk. We show that the choices that maximize the…
The entanglement of population dynamics, evolution, and adaptive radiation for species competing for resources is studied. For resource harvesting, we modify the model used in Ref. Phys. Rev. Lett. 118 048103 and introduce new resource…
Evolutionary analyses of large populations commonly incorporate stochasticity through temporal variation in selection while treating genetic transmission as fixed. Much less attention has been given to stochasticity in transmission itself.…
Machine learning models trained on real-world data may inadvertently make biased predictions that negatively impact marginalized communities. Reweighting, which assigns a weight to each data point used during model training, can mitigate…
To learn about the past from a sample of genomic sequences, one needs to understand how evolutionary processes shape genetic diversity. Most population genetic inference is based on frameworks assuming adaptive evolution is rare. But if…
A biologically motivated individual-based framework for evolution in network-structured populations is developed that can accommodate eco-evolutionary dynamics. This framework is used to construct a network birth and death model. The…
We study the evolutionary dynamics of an asexual population of nonmutators and mutators on a class of epistatic fitness landscapes. We consider the situation in which all mutations are deleterious and mutators are produced from nonmutators…
Normal anxiety is considered an adaptive response to the possible presence of danger, but is susceptible to dysregulation. Anxiety disorders are prevalent at high frequency in contemporary human societies, yet impose substantial disability…
Recent work has shown that expression level is the main predictor of a gene’s evolutionary rate, and that more highly expressed genes evolve slower. A possible explanation for this observation is selection for proteins which fold…
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…