Related papers: Spatial gene drives and pushed genetic waves
Understanding the temporal spread of gene drive alleles -- alleles that bias their own transmission -- through modeling is essential before any field experiments. In this paper, we present a deterministic reaction-diffusion model describing…
The spread of synthetic gene drives is often discussed in the context of panmictic populations connected by gene flow and described with simple deterministic models. Under such assumptions, an entire species could be altered by releasing a…
Gene drive alleles bias their own inheritance to offspring. They can fix in a wild-type population in spite of a fitness cost, and even lead to the eradication of the target population if the fitness cost is high. However, this outcome may…
This paper is concerned with a reaction--diffusion system modeling the fixation and the invasion in a population of a gene drive (an allele biasing inheritance, increasing its own transmission to offspring). In our model, the gene drive has…
Population management using artificial gene drives (alleles biasing inheritance, increasing their own transmission to offspring) is becoming a realistic possibility with the development of CRISPR-Cas genetic engineering. A gene drive may…
Range expansion and range shifts are crucial population responses to climate change. Genetic consequences are not well understood but are clearly coupled to ecological dynamics that, in turn, are driven by shifting climate conditions. We…
Spatially resolved genetic data is increasingly used to reconstruct the migrational history of species. To assist such inference, we study, by means of simulations and analytical methods, the dynamics of neutral gene frequencies in a…
Our models for detecting the effect of adaptation on population genomic diversity are often predicated on a single newly arisen mutation sweeping rapidly to fixation. However, a population can also adapt to a new situation by multiple…
When a biological population expands into new territory, genetic drift develops an enormous influence on evolution at the propagating front. In such range expansion processes, fluctuations in allele frequencies occur through stochastic…
Theory predicts rapid genetic drift during invasions, yet many expanding populations maintain high genetic diversity. We find that genetic drift is dramatically suppressed when dispersal rates increase with the population density because…
Conjugation is the primary mechanism of horizontal gene transfer that spreads antibiotic resistance among bacteria. Although conjugation normally occurs in surface-associated growth (e.g., biofilms), it has been traditionally studied in…
We develop and analyze a lattice difference equation (LDE) framework to model the spatial dynamics of invasion in populations. This framework extends beyond classical integro-difference and reaction-diffusion models by incorporating spatial…
Despite the advent of several novel, synthetic gene drive mechanisms and their potential to one-day control a number of devastating diseases, among other applications, practical use of these systems remains contentious and risky. In…
We analyze how temporal variability in local demography and dispersal combine to affect the rate of spread of an invading species. Our model combines state-structured local demography (specified by an integral or matrix projection model)…
As the success of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) on natural images quickly propels them into various real-life applications across different domains, it becomes more and more important to clearly understand their limitations.…
Natural populations often show enhanced genetic drift consistent with a strong skew in their offspring number distribution. The skew arises because the variability of family sizes is either inherently strong or amplified by population…
Gene-sharing networks provide a powerful framework to study the evolution of viruses and mobile genetic elements. These bipartite networks, which link genes to the genomes that contain them, exhibit characteristic degree distributions: a…
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…
In this paper, we study the scaling limit of a class of random walks which behave like simple random walks outside of a bounded region around the origin and which are subject to a partial reflection near the origin. If the probability of…
Sexual reproduction presents significant challenges to formal treatment of evolutionary processes. A starting point for systematic treatments of ecological and evolutionary phenomena has been provided by the gene centered view of evolution…