Related papers: Evolution at the edge of expanding populations
Population expansions trigger many biomedical and ecological transitions, from tumor growth to invasions of non-native species. Although population spreading often selects for more invasive phenotypes, we show that this outcome is far from…
The spreading of evolutionary novelties across populations is the central element of adaptation. Unless population are well-mixed (like bacteria in a shaken test tube), the spreading dynamics not only depends on fitness differences but also…
Different evolutionary models are known to make disparate predictions for the success of an invading mutant in some situations. For example, some evolutionary mechanics lead to amplification of selection in structured populations, while…
This paper focuses on the maximum speed at which biological evolution can occur. I derive inequalities that limit the rate of evolutionary processes driven by natural selection, mutations, or genetic drift. These \emph{rate limits} link the…
Darwinian evolution can be modeled in general terms as a flow in the space of fitness (i.e. reproductive rate) distributions. In the diffusion approximation, Tsimring et al. have showed that this flow admits "fitness wave" solutions:…
We analyze evolutionary dynamics in a confluent, branching cellular population, such as in a growing duct, vasculature, or in a branching microbial colony. We focus on the coarse-grained features of the evolution and build a statistical…
Risk spreading in bacterial populations is generally regarded as a strategy to maximize survival. Here, we study its role during range expansion of a genetically diverse population where growth and motility are two alternative traits. We…
Dispersal of species to find a more favorable habitat is important in population dynamics. Dispersal rates evolve in response to the relative success of different dispersal strategies. In a simplified deterministic treatment (J. Dockery, V.…
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…
Mutation rate is a key determinant of the pace as well as outcome of evolution, and variability in this rate has been shown in different scenarios to play a key role in evolutionary adaptation and resistance evolution under stress caused by…
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…
Understanding if and how mutants reach fixation in populations is an important question in evolutionary biology. We study the impact of population growth has on the success of mutants. To systematically understand the effects of growth we…
Many theoretical and experimental studies suggest that range expansions can have severe consequences for the gene pool of the expanding population. Due to strongly enhanced genetic drift at the advancing frontier, neutral and weakly…
The evolution of dispersal is a classical question in evolutionary ecology, which has been widely studied with several mathematical models. The main question is to define the fittest dispersal rate for a population in a bounded domain, and,…
An organism that is newly introduced into an existing population has a survival probability that is dependent on both the population density of its environment and the competition it experiences with the members of that population.…
Which factors govern the evolution of mutation rates and emergence of species? Here, we address this question using a first principles model of life where population dynamics of asexual organisms is coupled to molecular properties and…
We consider the effect of network structure on the evolution of a population. Models of this kind typically consider a population of fixed size and distribution. Here we consider eco-evolutionary dynamics where population size and…
Darwin's theory of evolution is considered to be one of the greatest scientific gems in modern science. It not only gives us a description of how living things evolve, but also shows how a population evolves through time and also, why only…
In a recent article, Desai and Fisher (2007) proposed that the speed of adaptation in an asexual population is determined by the dynamics of the stochastic edge of the population, that is, by the emergence and subsequent establishment of…
The concept of fitness is central to evolution, but it quantifies only the expected number of offspring an individual will produce. The actual number of offspring is also subject to noise, arising from environmental or demographic…