Related papers: Evolving generalists via dynamic sculpting of rugg…
In this work, we integrate theoretical modeling, molecular simulation, and empirical analysis to identify and characterize evolutionary hysteresis. We first show how epistatic interactions create bistable fitness landscapes and structural…
Genetic interactions can strongly influence the fitness effects of individual mutations, yet the impact of these epistatic interactions on evolutionary dynamics remains poorly understood. Here we investigate the evolutionary role of…
Biological populations are subject to fluctuating environmental conditions. Different adaptive strategies can allow them to cope with these fluctuations: specialization to one particular environmental condition, adoption of a generalist…
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…
As pathogens spread in a population of hosts, immunity is built up and the pool of susceptible individuals is depleted. This generates selective pressure, to which many human RNA viruses, such as influenza virus or SARS-CoV-2, respond with…
In epistatic fitness landscapes, the fitness effect of a mutation depends on the genetic background and may even switch between deleterious and beneficial depending on the presence of another mutation. Epistatic interactions may cause both…
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?…
Population dynamics and evolutionary genetics underly the structure of ecosystems, changing on the same timescale for interacting species with rapid turnover, such as virus (e.g. HIV) and immune response. Thus, an important problem in…
Proteins evolve through complex sequence spaces, with fitness landscapes serving as a conceptual framework that links sequence to function. Fitness landscapes can be smooth, where multiple similarly accessible evolutionary paths are…
Mutational robustness quantifies the effect of random mutations on fitness. When mutational robustness is high, most mutations do not change fitness or have only a minor effect on it. From the point of view of fitness landscapes, robust…
Fitness consequence of dispersal depends on property of the entire landscape, which patches are available and what are the cost of moving. These are information that are not available locally when an organism make the decision to disperse.…
Fitness landscapes are mappings between genotypes, phenotypes, and fitness that shape evolution. In recent years, empirical work and theoretical models have greatly advanced our understanding of how populations navigate rugged fitness…
We introduce a new model of evolution on a fitness landscape possessing a tunable degree of neutrality. The model allows us to study the general properties of molecular species undergoing neutral evolution. We find that a number of…
Living systems evolve one mutation at a time, but a single mutation can alter the effect of subsequent mutations. The underlying mechanistic determinants of such epistasis are unclear. Here, we demonstrate that the physical dynamics of a…
Selection in a time-periodic environment is modeled via the continuous-time two-player replicator dynamics, which for symmetric pay-offs reduces to the Fisher equation of mathematical genetics. For a sufficiently rapid and cyclic…
Background: The rate at which fitness declines as an organism's genome accumulates random mutations is an important variable in several evolutionary theories. At an intuitive level, it might seem natural that random mutations should tend to…
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…
If two species exhibit different nonlinear responses to a single shared resource, and if each species modifies the resource dynamics such that this favors its competitor, they may stably coexist. This coexistence mechanism, known as…
The idea that there are any large-scale trends in the evolution of biological organisms is highly controversial. It is commonly believed, for example, that there is a large-scale trend in evolution towards increasing complexity, but…
Environmental science almost invariably proposes problems of extreme complexity, typically characterized by strongly nonlinear evolution dynamics. The systems under investigation have many degrees of freedom - which makes them complicated -…