Related papers: Natural selection in compartmentalized environment…

The amplification cycle of many replicators (natural or artificial) involves the usage of a host compartment, inside of which the replicator express phenotypic compounds necessary to carry out its genetic replication. For example, viruses…

Plant breeding programs use data obtained from multi-environment selection experiments to produce improved varieties with the ultimate aim of maintaining high levels of genetic gain. Selection accuracy can be improved with the use of…

Both evolution and ecology have long been concerned with the impact of variable environmental conditions on observed levels of genetic diversity within and between species. We model the evolution of a quantitative trait under selection that…

The evolutionary dynamics of molecular populations are strongly dependent on the structure of genotype spaces. The map between genotype and phenotype determines how easily genotype spaces can be navigated and the accessibility of…

We study the evolution of recombination using a microscopic model developed within the frame of the theory of quantitative traits. Two components of fitness are considered: a static one that describes adaptation to environmental factors not…

One of the most intriguing questions in evolution is how organisms exhibit suitable phenotypic variation to rapidly adapt in novel selective environments which is crucial for evolvability. Recent work showed that when selective environments…

Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. In stochastic descriptions of evolutionary dynamics, such as the Moran process, individuals are chosen randomly for birth and for death. If the same type is chosen for both steps,…

Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. It is well known that population structure can affect evolutionary dynamics. Traditionally, natural selection is studied between mutants that differ in reproductive rate, but are…

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…

Large sets of genotypes give rise to the same phenotype because phenotypic expression is highly redundant. Accordingly, a population can accept mutations without altering its phenotype, as long as thegenotype mutates into another one on the…

In evolutionary algorithms, the fitness of a population increases with time by mutating and recombining individuals and by a biased selection of more fit individuals. The right selection pressure is critical in ensuring sufficient…

Mutational robustness quantifies the effect of random mutations on fitness. When mutational robustness is high, most mutations do not change fitness or have only a minor effect on it. From the point of view of fitness landscapes, robust…

Conventional population genetics considers the evolution of a limited number of genotypes corresponding to phenotypes with different fitness. As model phenotypes, in particular RNA secondary structure, have become computationally tractable,…

Can prelife proceed without cell division? A recently proposed mechanism suggests that transient compartmentalization could have preceded cell division in prebiotic scenarios. Here, we study transient compartmentalization dynamics in the…

We study a continuous-time dynamical system that models the evolving distribution of genotypes in an infinite population where genomes may have infinitely many or even a continuum of loci, mutations accumulate along lineages without…

We introduce a new model of evolution on a fitness landscape possessing a tunable degree of neutrality. The model allows us to study the general properties of molecular species undergoing neutral evolution. We find that a number of…

Molecular phenotypes are important links between genomic information and organismic functions, fitness, and evolution. Complex phenotypes, which are also called quantitative traits, often depend on multiple genomic loci. Their evolution…

Biological evolution can be conceptualized as a search process in the space of gene sequences guided by the fitness landscape, a mapping that assigns a measure of reproductive value to each genotype. Here we discuss probabilistic models of…

Evolutionary dynamics and patterns of molecular evolution are strongly influenced by selection on linked regions of the genome, but our quantitative understanding of these effects remains incomplete. Recent work has focused on predicting…

With a view to connecting random mutation on the molecular level to punctuated equilibrium behavior on the phenotype level, we propose a new model for biological evolution, which incorporates random mutation and natural selection. In this…