Related papers: Ancestry in adapting, spatially-extended populatio…
The dynamics of well-mixed biological populations is usually studied by mean-field methods and weak-noise expansions. Similar methods have been applied also in spatially extended problems, relying on the fact that these populations are…
Some species exhibit very high levels of DNA sequence variability; there is also evidence for the existence of heritable epigenetic variants that experience state changes at a much higher rate than sequence variants. In both cases, the…
Synergistic and antagonistic interactions in multi-species populations - such as resource sharing and competition - result in remarkably diverse behaviors in populations of interacting cells, such as in soil or human microbiomes, or clonal…
A population evolving in an inhomogeneous environment will adapt differently to different regions. We study the conditions under which such a population can maintain adaptations to a particular region when that region is not stationary, but…
This paper investigates the problem of adjusting for spatial effects in genomic prediction. Despite being seldomly considered in genomic prediction, spatial effects often affect phenotypic measurements of plants. We consider a Gaussian…
The paper reviews the results obtained for spatial population models and the evolution of the genealogies of these populations during the last decade by the author and his coworkers. The focus is on their large scale behaviour and on the…
In classical evolutionary theory, genetic variation provides the source of heritable phenotypic variation on which natural selection acts. Against this classical view, several theories have emphasized that developmental variability and…
We are interested in populations in which the fitness of different genetic types fluctuates in time and space, driven by temporal and spatial fluctuations in the environment. For simplicity, our population is assumed to be composed of just…
Over time, a population acquires neutral genetic substitutions as a consequence of random drift. A famous result in population genetics asserts that the rate, $K$, at which these substitutions accumulate in the population coincides with the…
In evolution, the effects of a single deleterious mutation can sometimes be compensated for by a second mutation which recovers the original phenotype. Such epistatic interactions have implications for the structure of genome space -…
When a population inhabits an inhomogeneous environment, the fitness value of traits can vary with the position in the environment. Gene flow caused by random mating can nevertheless prevent that a sexually reproducing population splits…
Stronger selection implies faster evolution---that is, the greater the force, the faster the change. This apparently self-evident proposition, however, is derived under the assumption that genetic variation within a population is primarily…
We analyse the statistical properties of genealogical trees in a neutral model of a closed population with sexual reproduction and non-overlapping generations. By reconstructing the genealogy of an individual from the population evolution,…
We study the limit of many small mutations of a model of population dynamics. The population is structured by phonological traits and is spatially inhomogeneous. The various sub-populations compete for the same nutrient which diffuses…
If one goes backward in time, the number of ancestors of an individual doubles at each generation. This exponential growth very quickly exceeds the population size, when this size is finite. As a consequence, the ancestors of a given…
Geographic structure can affect patterns of genetic differentiation and speciation rates. In this article, we investigate the dynamics of genetic distances in a geographically structured metapopulation. We model the metapopulation as a…
When organisms adapt to spatially heterogeneous environments, selection may drive divergence at multiple genes. If populations under divergent selection also exchange migrants, we expect genetic differentiation to be high at selected loci,…
A steady influx of a single deleterious multilocus genotype will impose genetic load on the resident population and leave multiple descendants carrying various numbers of the foreign alleles. Provided that the foreign types are rare at…
Genotype-phenotype (GP) maps specify how the random mutations that change genotypes generate variation by altering phenotypes, which, in turn, can trigger selection. Many GP maps share the following general properties: 1) The number of…
Human populations have experienced dramatic growth since the Neolithic revolution. Recent studies that sequenced a very large number of individuals observed an extreme excess of rare variants, and provided clear evidence of recent rapid…