Related papers: Biophysical constraints determine the selection of…
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…
When a collection of phenotypically diverse organisms compete with each other for limited resources, with competition being strongest amongst the most similar, the population can evolve into tightly localised clusters. This process can be…
Adaptation in a fluctuating environment is a process of fueling environmental information to gain fitness. Living systems have gradually developed strategies for adaptation from random and passive diversification of the phenotype to more…
Single-cell experiments revealed substantial variability in generation times, growth rates but also in birth and division sizes between genetically identical cells. Understanding how these fluctuations determine the fitness of the…
Coevolving and competing species or game-theoretic strategies exhibit rich and complex dynamics for which a general theoretical framework based on finite populations is still lacking. Recently, an explicit mean-field description in the form…
The Darwinian paradigm of biological evolution is based on the separability of the variation and selection processes. As a result, the population thinking had always been an integral part of the Darwinian approach. I propose an alternative…
Environmental variations can significantly influence how populations compete for resources, and hence shape their evolution. Here, we study population dynamics subject to a fluctuating environment modeled by a varying carrying capacity…
Evolutionary games on graphs describe how strategic interactions and population structure determine evolutionary success, quantified by the probability that a single mutant takes over a population. Graph structures, compared to the…
Bacteriophage-bacteria interactions are central to microbial ecology, influencing evolution, biogeochemical cycles, and pathogen behavior. Most theoretical models assume static environments and passive bacterial hosts, neglecting the joint…
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…
One of the most striking effect of fluctuations in evolutionary game theory is the possibility for mutants to fixate (take over) an entire population. Here, we generalize a recent WKB-based theory to study fixation in evolutionary games…
Single-cell experiments have revealed cell-to-cell variability in generation times and growth rates for genetically identical cells. Theoretical models relating the fluctuating generation times of single cells to the population growth rate…
An equation describing the evolution of phenotypic distribution is derived using methods developed in statistical physics. The equation is solved by using the singular perturbation method, and assuming that the number of bases in the…
Cells with the same genome can exist in different phenotypes. and can change between distinct phenotypes when subject to specific stimuli and microenvironments. Some examples include cell differentiation during development, reprogramming…
Collective motion - or flocking - is an emergent phenomena that underlies many biological processes of relevance, from cellular migrations to animal groups movement. In this work, we derive scaling relations for the fluctuations of the mean…
Non-genetic perturbations, such as environmental change or developmental noise, can induce novel phenotypes. If an induced phenotype confers a fitness advantage, selection may promote its genetic stabilization. Non-genetic perturbations can…
Evolution is a dynamic process. The two classical forces of evolution are mutation and selection. Assuming small mutation rates, evolution can be predicted based solely on the fitness differences between phenotypes. Predicting an…
Many species of microbes cooperate by producing public goods from which they collectively benefit. However, these populations are under the risk of being taken over by cheating mutants that do not contribute to the pool of public goods.…
Ecological networks such as plant-pollinator systems and food webs vary in space and time. This variability includes fluctuations in global network properties such as total number and intensity of interactions but also in the local…
In biology phenotypic switching is a common bet-hedging strategy in the face of uncertain environmental conditions. Existing mathematical models often focus on periodically changing environments to determine the optimal phenotypic response.…