Related papers: Genetic Drift and Mutation
One of the key difficulties in using estimation-of-distribution algorithms is choosing the population size(s) appropriately: Too small values lead to genetic drift, which can cause enormous difficulties. In the regime with no genetic drift,…
We study a general setting of neutral evolution in which the population is of finite, constant size and can have spatial structure. Mutation leads to different genetic types ("traits"), which can be discrete or continuous. Under minimal…
Some species exhibit very high levels of DNA sequence variability; there is also evidence for the existence of heritable epigenetic variants that experience state changes at a much higher rate than sequence variants. In both cases, the…
The accumulation of beneficial mutations on many competing genetic backgrounds in rapidly adapting populations has a striking impact on evolutionary dynamics. This effect, known as clonal interference, causes erratic fluctuations in the…
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,…
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…
Population genetic studies have found evidence for dramatic population growth in recent human history. It is unclear how this recent population growth, combined with the effects of negative natural selection, has affected patterns of…
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 large populations, multiple beneficial mutations may be simultaneously spreading. In asexual populations, these mutations must either arise on the same background or compete against each other. In sexual populations, recombination can…
The drift-barrier hypothesis states that random genetic drift constrains the refinement of a phenotype under natural selection. The influence of effective population size and the genome-wide deleterious mutation rate were studied…
Competition between random genetic drift and natural selection plays a central role in evolution: Whereas non-beneficial mutations often prevail in small populations by chance, mutations that sweep through large populations typically confer…
A mutator is an allele that increases the mutation rate throughout the genome by disrupting some aspect of DNA replication or repair. Mutators that increase the mutation rate by the order of 100 fold have been observed to spontaneously…
In evolutionary dynamics, a key measure of a mutant trait's success is the probability that it takes over the population given some initial mutant-appearance distribution. This "fixation probability" is difficult to compute in general, as…
We consider a trait-structured population subject to mutation, birth and competition of logistic type, where the number of coexisting types may fluctuate. Applying a limit of rare mutations to this population while keeping the population…
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…
When mutation rates are low, natural selection remains effective, and increasing the mutation rate can give rise to an increase in adaptation rate. When mutation rates are high to begin with, however, increasing the mutation rate may have a…
We study the dynamics of an age-structured population in which the life expectancy of an offspring may be mutated with respect to that of its parent. When advantageous mutation is favored, the average fitness of the population grows…
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…
We study the dynamics of a population subject to selective pressures, evolving either on RNA neutral networks or in toy fitness landscapes. We discuss the spread and the neutrality of the population in the steady state. Different limits…
Languages and genes are both transmitted from generation to generation, with opportunity for differential reproduction and survivorship of forms. Here we apply a rigorous inference framework, drawn from population genetics, to distinguish…