Related papers: Genetic Drift and Mutation
Understanding the temporal spread of gene drive alleles -- alleles that bias their own transmission -- through modeling is essential before any field experiments. In this paper, we present a deterministic reaction-diffusion model describing…
Evolutionary branching is analysed in a stochastic, individual-based population model under mutation and selection. In such models, the common assumption is that individual reproduction and life career are characterised by values of a…
Motivated by present activities in (statistical) physics directed towards biological evolution, we review the interplay of three evolutionary forces: mutation, selection, and genetic drift. The review addresses itself to physicists and…
When beneficial mutations are rare, they accumulate by a series of selective sweeps. But when they are common, many beneficial mutations will occur before any can fix, so there will be many different mutant lineages in the population…
Selective sweeps affect neutral genetic diversity through hitchhiking. While this effect is limited to the local genomic region of the sweep in panmictic populations, we find that in spatially-extended populations the combined effects of…
We study the accumulation of deleterious mutations in a haploid, asexually reproducing population, using analytical models and computer simulations. We find that Muller's ratchet can come to a halt in small populations as a consequence of a…
In this short communication, we shall explore a nonlinear discrete dynamical system that naturally occurs in population systems to describe a transmission of a trait from parents to their offspring. We consider a Mendelian inheritance for a…
Environment plays a fundamental role in the competition for resources, and hence in the evolution of populations. Here, we study a well-mixed, finite population consisting of two strains competing for the limited resources provided by an…
We study the genetic behaviour of a population formed by haploid individuals which reproduce asexually. The genetic information for each individual is stored along a bit-string (or chromosome) with L bits, where 0-bits represent the…
In this paper, we propose a numerical method to uniformly handle the random genetic drift model for pure drift with or without natural selection and mutation. For pure drift and natural selection case, the Dirac $\delta$ singularity will…
We explore the connection between evolution and large-deviation theory. To do so, we study evolutionary dynamics in which individuals experience mutations, reproduction, and selection using variants of the Moran model. We show that, in the…
Mutualistic interactions benefit both partners, promoting coexistence and genetic diversity. Spatial structure can promote cooperation, but spatial expansions may also make it hard for mutualistic partners to stay together, since genetic…
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…
Evolving genomes increase a number of their genes by gene duplications. To escape degradation in a functionless pseudogene, any gene duplicate needs to be guarded by negative (purifying) selection from otherwise inevitable fixation of…
We consider the evolution of populations under the joint action of mutation and differential reproduction, or selection. The population is modelled as a finite-type Markov branching process in continuous time, and the associated…
Existing theoretical models of evolution focus on the relative fitness advantages of different mutants in a population while the dynamic behavior of the population size is mostly left unconsidered. We here present a generic stochastic model…
We study the competition between several advantageous mutants in an asexual population (clonal interference) as a function of the time between the appearance of the mutants, their selective advantages, and the rate of deleterious mutations.…
We investigate the evolutionary dynamics in directed and/or weighted networks. We study the fixation probability of a mutant in finite populations in stochastic voter-type dynamics for several update rules. The fixation probability is…
Speciation is of fundamental importance to understanding the huge diversity of life on Earth. In contrast to current phenomenological models, we develop a biophysically motivated approach to study speciation involving the co-evolution of…
Maintenance of sexual reproduction and genetic recombination imposes physiological costs when compared to parthenogenic reproduction, most prominently: for maintaining the corresponding (molecular) machinery, for finding a mating partner,…