Related papers: Survival under high mutation rates

The dynamics of two competing species in a finite size community is one of the most studied problems in population genetics and community ecology. Stochastic fluctuations lead, inevitably, to the extinction of one of the species, but the…

The paper is devoted to the study of the asymptotic behaviour of Moran process in random environment, say random selection. In finite population, the Moran process may be degenerate in finite time, thus we will study its limiting process in…

Understanding why we age is a long-lived open problem in evolutionary biology. Aging is prejudicial to the individual and evolutionary forces should prevent it, but many species show signs of senescence as individuals age. Here, I will…

We investigate the formation of stable ecological networks where many species share the same resource. We show that such stable ecosystem naturally occurs as a result of extinctions. We obtain an analytical relation for the number of…

Infinitely many distinct trait values may arise in populations bearing quantitative traits, and modeling their population dynamics is thus a formidable task. While classical models assume fixed or infinite population size, models in which…

Population structure can be modelled by evolutionary graphs, which can have a substantial, but very subtle influence on the fate of the arising mutants. Individuals are located on the nodes of these graphs, competing with each other to…

Laboratory experiments with bacterial colonies, under well-controlled conditions often lead to evolutionary diversification, where at least two ecotypes emerge from an initially monomorphic population. Empirical evidence suggests that such…

Traditionally, frequency dependent evolutionary dynamics is described by deterministic replicator dynamics assuming implicitly infinite population sizes. Only recently have stochastic processes been introduced to study evolutionary dynamics…

A model for the evolution of a finite population in a rugged fitness landscape is introduced and solved. The population is trapped in an evolutionary loop, alternating periods of stasis to periods in which it performs adaptive walks. The…

This paper shows that differentiating the lifetimes of two phenotypes independently from their fertility can lead to a qualitative change in the equilibrium of a population: since survival and reproduction are distinct functional aspects of…

Mathematical models of population extinction have a variety of applications in such areas as ecology, paleontology and conservation biology. Here we propose and investigate two types of sub-exponential models of population extinction.The…

We present a statistical analysis of biological evolution processes. Specifically, we study the stochastic replication-mutation-death model where the population of a species may grow or shrink by birth or death, respectively, and…

We are interested in the impact of natural selection in a prey-predator community. We introduce an individual-based model of the community that takes into account both prey and predator phenotypes. Our aim is to understand the phenotypic…

A key question in evolution is how likely a mutant is to take over. This depends on natural selection and on stochastic fluctuations. Population spatial structure can impact mutant fixation probabilities. We introduce a model for structured…

It is a common practice to describe branching random walks in terms of birth, death and walk of particles, which makes it easier to use them in different applications. The main results obtained for the models of symmetric continuous-time…

We study the evolutionary dynamics of a phenotypically structured population in a changing environment , where the environmental conditions vary with a linear trend but in an oscillatory manner. Such phenomena can be described by parabolic…

The current rate of species extinction is rapidly approaching unprecedented highs and life on Earth presently faces a sixth mass extinction event driven by anthropogenic activity, climate change and ecological collapse. The field of…

Ecosystems often undergo abrupt regime shifts in response to gradual external changes. These shifts are theoretically understood as a regime switch between alternative stable states of the ecosystem dynamical response to smooth changes in…

Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…

Microorganisms live in environments that inevitably fluctuate between mild and harsh conditions. As harsh conditions may cause extinctions, the rate at which fluctuations occur can shape microbial communities and their diversity, but we…