Related papers: Identifying conversion efficiency as a key mechani…
We use fitness graphs, or directed cube graphs, for analyzing evolutionary reversibility. The main application is antimicrobial drug resistance. Reversible drug resistance has been observed both clinically and experimentally. If drug…
In this work we employ various methods of analysis (unfolding simulations and comparative analysis of structures and sequences of proteomes of thermophilic organisms) to show that organisms can follow two major strategies of thermophilic…
Diagrammatic models of feeding choices reveal fundamental robotic behaviors. Successful choices are reinforced by positive feedback, while unsuccessful ones by negative feedback. This paper will address robotic feeding by casually relating…
Random walks on multidimensional nonlinear landscapes are of interest in many areas of science and engineering. In particular, properties of adaptive trajectories on fitness landscapes determine population fates and thus play a central role…
In this paper, we use an adaptive modeling framework to model and study how nutritional status (measured by the protein to carbohydrate ratio) may regulate population dynamics and foraging task allocation of social insect colonies.…
Feeding a larger and wealthier global population without transgressing ecological limits is increasingly challenging, as rising food demand (especially for animal products) intensifies pressure on ecosystems, accelerates deforestation, and…
Diverse biological networks exhibit universal features distinguished from those of random networks, calling much attention to their origins and implications. Here we propose a minimal evolution model of Boolean regulatory networks, which…
Organisms that exploit different environments may experience a stochastic delay in adjusting their fitness when they switch habitats. We study two species whose fitness is determined by the species composition of the local environment, as…
Popular hypotheses about the origins of collective adaptation are related to two basic behaviours: protection from predators and a combined search for food resources. Among the anti-predator explanations, the predator confusion hypothesis…
The size structure of fish-communities is an emergent high-level property of marine food webs responsive to changes in structure and function. To measure this food web property using data arising from routine fisheries surveys, a simple…
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…
Since protein mutations are the main driving force of evolution at the molecular level, a proper analysis of them (and the factors controlling them) will enable us to find a response to several crucial queries in evolutionary biology. Among…
Character evolution that affects ecological community interactions often occurs contemporaneously with temporal changes in population size, potentially altering the very nature of those dynamics. Such eco-evolutionary processes may be most…
Mass extinction is a phenomenon in the history of life on Earth when a considerable number of species go extinct over a relatively short period of time. The magnitude of extinction varies between the events, the most well known are the…
An important challenge in theoretical ecology is to find good, coarse-grained representations of complex food webs. Here we use the approach of generalized modeling to show that it may be possible to formulate a coarse-graining algorithm…
Is evolution always gradual or can it make leaps? We examine a mathematical model of an evolutionary process on a fitness landscape and obtain analytic solutions for the probability of multi-mutation leaps, that is, several mutations…
One of the major characteristics of living organisms is metabolic rate, which is the amount of energy produced per unit of time. When the mass of organisms increases, the metabolic rate also increases (usually as a power function of mass),…
A fundamental question for evolutionary biology is why rates of evolution vary dramatically between proteins. Perhaps surprisingly, it is controversial how much a protein's functional importance affects its rate of evolution. In most…
A robotic swarm that is required to operate for long periods in a potentially unknown environment can use both evolution and individual learning methods in order to adapt. However, the role played by the environment in influencing the…
We study the evolution of recombination using a microscopic model developed within the frame of the theory of quantitative traits. Two components of fitness are considered: a static one that describes adaptation to environmental factors not…