Related papers: Mutation rate variability as a driving force in ad…
Ecology and evolution under changing environments are important in many subfields of biology with implications for medicine. Here, we explore an example: the consequences of fluctuating environments on the emergence of antibiotic…
Stochastic phenotype switching has been suggested to play a beneficial role in microbial populations by leading to the division of labour among cells, or ensuring that at least some of the population survives an unexpected change in…
Biological evolution of a population is governed by the fitness landscape, which is a map from genotype to fitness. However, a fitness landscape depends on the organisms environment, and evolution in changing environments is still poorly…
The environment in which a population evolves can have a crucial impact on selection. We study evolutionary dynamics in finite populations of fixed size in a changing environment. The population dynamics are driven by birth and death…
The evolution of antimicrobial resistance generally occurs in an environment where antimicrobial concentration is variable, which has dramatic consequences on the microorganisms' fitness landscape, and thus on the evolution of resistance.…
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…
Although mutations drive the evolutionary process, the rates at which the mutations occur are themselves subject to evolutionary forces. Our purpose here is to understand the role of selection and random genetic drift in the evolution of…
Bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics by a multitude of mechanisms. A central, yet unsolved question is how resistance evolution affects cell growth at different drug levels. Here we develop a fitness model that predicts growth rates of…
The outcomes of evolution are determined by which mutations occur and fix. In rapidly adapting microbial populations, this process is particularly hard to predict because lineages with different beneficial mutations often spread…
The persistence of life requires populations to adapt at a rate commensurate with the dynamics of their environment. Successful populations that inhabit highly variable environments have evolved mechanisms to increase the likelihood of…
There is a pressing need to better understand how microbial populations respond to antimicrobial drugs, and to find mechanisms to possibly eradicate antimicrobial-resistant cells. The inactivation of antimicrobials by resistant microbes can…
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…
BACKGROUND: An important question is whether evolution favors properties such as mutational robustness or evolvability that do not directly benefit any individual, but can influence the course of future evolution. Functionally similar…
Biological systems are modular, and this modularity affects the evolution of biological systems over time and in different environments. We here develop a theory for the dynamics of evolution in a rugged, modular fitness landscape. We show…
Whether evolution can be predicted is a key question in evolutionary biology. Here we set out to better understand the repeatability of evolution. We explored experimentally the effect of mutation supply and the strength of selective…
The rate of biological evolution depends on the fixation probability and on the fixation time of new mutants. Intensive research has focused on identifying population structures that augment the fixation probability of advantageous mutants.…
One essential ingredient of evolutionary theory is the concept of fitness as a measure for a species' success in its living conditions. Here, we quantify the effect of environmental fluctuations onto fitness by analytical calculations on a…
Mutation has traditionally been regarded as an important operator in evolutionary algorithms. In particular, there have been many experimental studies which showed the effectiveness of adapting mutation rates for various static optimization…
In unicellular organisms such as bacteria and in most viruses, mutations mainly occur during reproduction. Thus, genotypes with a high birth rate should have a higher mutation rate. However, standard models of asexual adaptation such as the…
Antibiotic resistance is a growing public health problem. To gain a fundamental understanding of resistance evolution, a combination of systematic experimental and theoretical approaches is required. Evolution experiments combined with…