Related papers: Evolving generalists via dynamic sculpting of rugg…
The purpose of this roadmap article is to draw attention to a paradigm shift in our understanding of evolution towards a perspective of ecological-evolutionary feedback, highlighted through two recent highly simplified examples of rapid…
Selection in a time-periodic environment is modeled via the two-player replicator dynamics. For sufficiently fast environmental changes, this is reduced to a multi-player replicator dynamics in a constant environment. The two-player terms…
How large ecosystems can create and maintain the remarkable biodiversity we see in nature is probably one of the biggest open questions in science, attracting attention from different fields, from Theoretical Ecology to Mathematics and…
Ecology and evolution are inherently linked, and studying a mathematical model that considers both holds promise of insightful discoveries related to the dynamics of cooperation. In the present article, we use the prisoner's dilemma (PD)…
Most of the DNA that composes a complex organism is non-coding and defined as junk. Even the coding part is composed of genes that affect the phenotype differently. Therefore, a random mutation has an effect on the specimen fitness that…
Growing efforts to measure fitness landscapes in molecular and microbial systems are premised on a tight relationship between landscape topography and evolutionary trajectories. This relationship, however, is far from being straightforward:…
We study the role of the adaptive movement strategy in promoting biodiversity in cyclic models described by the rock-paper-scissors game rules. We assume that individuals of one out of the species may adjust their movement to escape hostile…
Mutualistic interactions, where individuals from different species can benefit from each other, are widespread across ecosystems. This study develops a general deterministic model of mutualism involving two populations, assuming that…
Exploiting the mathematical curiosity of intransitive dice, we present a simple theoretical model for co-evolution that captures scales ranging from the genome of the individual to the system-wide emergence of species diversity. We study a…
Fitness landscapes are a useful concept to study the dynamics of meta-heuristics. In the last two decades, they have been applied with success to estimate the optimization power of several types of evolutionary algorithms, including genetic…
Intransitivity is supposed to be a main reason for deficits in coevolutionary progress and inheritable superiority. Besides, coevolutionary dynamics is characterized by interactions yielding subjective fitness, but aiming at solutions that…
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 depends on the passing down to subsequent generations of genetic information encoding beneficial traits, and on the removal of unfit individuals by a selection mechanism. However, selection acts on phenotypes, and is…
We propose a minimal model to simulate long waiting times followed by evolutionary bursts on rugged landscapes. It combines point and inversions-like mutations as sources of genetic variation. The inversions are intended to simulate one of…
Constraints on changes in expression levels across all cell components imposed by the steady growth of cells have recently been discussed both experimentally and theoretically. By assuming a small environmental perturbation and considering…
All possible phenotypes are not equally accessible to evolving populations. In fact, only phenotypes of large size, i.e. those resulting from many different genotypes, are found in populations of sequences, presumably because they are…
Concomitant with the evolution of biological diversity must have been the evolution of mechanisms that facilitate evolution, due to the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence space. We describe how evolvability can be an object…
Microbial ecosystems are remarkably diverse, stable, and often consist of a balanced mixture of core and peripheral species. Here we propose a conceptual model exhibiting all these emergent properties in quantitative agreement with real…
Globally, we are witnessing the rise of complex, non-communicable diseases (NCDs) related to changes in our daily environments. Obesity, asthma, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes are part of a long list of "lifestyle" diseases…
Multipartite viruses replicate through a puzzling evolutionary strategy. Their genome is segmented into two or more parts, and encapsidated in separate particles that appear to propagate independently. Completing the replication cycle,…