Related papers: Evolution in range expansions with competition at …
A strong demographic Allee effect in which the expected population growth rate is negative below a certain critical population size can cause high extinction probabilities in small introduced populations. However, many species are…
Phenotypic plasticity and its evolution may help evolutionary rescue in a novel and stressful environment, especially if environmental novelty reveals cryptic genetic variation that enables the evolution of increased plasticity. However,…
Frequency dependent selection and demographic fluctuations play important roles in evolutionary and ecological processes. Under frequency dependent selection, the average fitness of the population may increase or decrease based on…
We study the evolution of asexual microorganisms with small mutation rate in fluctuating environments, and develop techniques that allow us to expand the formal solution of the evolution equations to first order in the mutation rate. Our…
The spatial dispersal of individuals is known to play an important role in the dynamics of populations, and is central to metapopulation theory. At the same time, local adaptation to environmental conditions creates a geographic mosaic of…
The maintenance of diversity, the `commonness of rarity', and compositional turnover are ubiquitous features of species-rich communities. Through a minimal model, we consider how these features reflect the interplay between environmental…
We study by simulation the effect of the diffusive motion of repressor molecules on the noise in mRNA and protein levels in the case of a repressed gene. We find that spatial fluctuations due to diffusion can drastically enhance the noise…
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…
We describe a continuous-time modelling framework for biological population dynamics that accounts for demographic noise. In the spirit of the methodology used by statistical physicists, transitions between the states of the system are…
Phylogenetic diversity is a measure for describing how much of an evolutionary tree is spanned by a subset of species. If one applies this to the (unknown) subset of current species that will still be present at some future time, then this…
Mathematical models of motility are often based on random-walk descriptions of discrete individuals that can move according to certain rules. It is usually the case that large masses concentrated in small regions of space have a great…
We investigate the influence of a shifting environment on the spreading of an invasive species through a model given by the diffusive logistic equation with a free boundary. When the environment is homogeneous and favourable, this model was…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
Human mobility and activity patterns mediate contagion on many levels, including the spatial spread of infectious diseases, diffusion of rumors, and emergence of consensus. These patterns however are often dominated by specific locations…
Microorganisms live in environments that inevitably fluctuate between mild and harsh conditions. As harsh conditions may cause extinctions, the rate at which fluctuations occur can shape microbial communities and their diversity, but we…
We consider the evolutionary trajectories traced out by an infinite population undergoing mutation-selection dynamics in static, uncorrelated random fitness landscapes. Starting from the population that consists of a single genotype, the…
Biological populations are subject to two types of noise: demographic stochasticity due to fluctuations in the reproductive success of individuals, and environmental variations that affect coherently the relative fitness of entire…
In this paper, we study the scaling limit of a class of random walks which behave like simple random walks outside of a bounded region around the origin and which are subject to a partial reflection near the origin. If the probability of…
Theoretical understanding of evolutionary dynamics in spatially structured populations often relies on non-spatial models. Biofilms are among such populations where a more accurate understanding is of theoretical interest and can reveal new…