Related papers: Biophysical constraints determine the selection of…

Experiments in recent years have vividly demonstrated that gene expression can be highly stochastic. How protein concentration fluctuations affect the growth rate of a population of cells, is, however, a wide open question. We present a…

Developmental trajectories are known to be canalized, or robust to both environmental and genetic perturbations. However, even when these trajectories are decanalized by an environmental perturbation outside of the range of conditions to…

Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. The structure of a biological population affects which traits evolve. Understanding evolutionary game dynamics in structured populations is difficult. Precise results have been…

In many biological processes, the size of a population changes stochastically with time, and recent work in the context of cancer and bacterial growth have focused on the situation when the mean population size grows exponentially. Here,…

We study the effects of demographic stochasticity on the long-term dynamics of biological coevolution models of community assembly. The noise is induced in order to check the validity of deterministic population dynamics. While mutualistic…

We consider populations structured by a phenotypic trait and a space variable, in a non-homogeneous environment. In the case of sex- ual populations, we are able to derive models close to existing mod- els in theoretical biology, from a…

Using a population dynamics inspired by an ensemble of growing cells, a set of fluctuation theorems linking observables measured at the lineage and population levels are derived. One of these relations implies specific inequalities…

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…

In nature microbial populations are subject to fluctuating nutrient levels. Nutrient fluctuations are important for evolutionary and ecological dynamics in microbial communities since they impact growth rates, population sizes and biofilm…

Biodiversity and extinction are central issues in evolution. Dynamical balance among different species in ecosystems is often described by deterministic replicator equations with moderate success. However, fluctuations are inevitable,…

Phenotypically structured equations arise in population biology to describe the interaction of species with their environment that brings the nutrients. This interaction usually leads to selection of the fittest individuals. Models used in…

Highly-diverse ecosystems exhibit a broad distribution of population sizes and species turnover, where species at high and low abundances are exchanged over time. We show that these two features generically emerge in the fluctuating phase…

Phenotype of biological systems needs to be robust against mutation in order to sustain themselves between generations. On the other hand, phenotype of an individual also needs to be robust against fluctuations of both internal and external…

The emerging field of high-throughput compartmentalized in vitro evolution is a promising new approach to protein engineering. In these experiments, libraries of mutant genotypes are randomly distributed and expressed in microscopic…

While Neutral Theory famously describes the number of discrete genetic differences in populations, we consider the number of genetic backgrounds under which such differences are observed - setting limits to the generalizability of their…

Non-selective effects, like genetic drift, are an important factor in modern conceptions of evolution, and have been extensively studied for constant population sizes. Here, we consider non-selective evolution in the case of growing…

Ecological interactions can dramatically alter evolutionary outcomes in complex communities. Yet, the framework of population genetics largely neglects interactions from a species-rich community. Here, we bridge this gap by using dynamical…

Collective cell migration plays a crucial role in numerous biological processes, including tumour growth, wound healing, and the immune response. Often, the migrating population consists of cells with various different phenotypes. This…

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…

Traditionally evolution is seen as a process where from a pool of possible variations of a population (e.g. biological species or industrial goods) a few variations get selected which survive and proliferate, whereas the others vanish.…