Related papers: Subpopulations and Stability in Microbial Communit…

In ecology, species can mitigate their extinction risks in uncertain environments by diversifying individual phenotypes. This observation is quantified by the theory of bet-hedging, which provides a reason for the degree of phenotypic…

In a manner similar to the molecular chaos that underlies the stable thermodynamics of gases, neuronal system may exhibit microscopic instability in individual neuronal dynamics while a macroscopic order of the entire population possibly…

Ecosystems, which are intricate amalgams of biological communities and their surrounding environments, continually evolve under the influence of their myriad interactions. The world is currently facing intensifying environmental…

In the context of global warming, tree populations rely on two primary mechanisms of adaptation: phenotypic plasticity, which enables individuals to adjust their behavior in response to environmental stress, and genetic evolution, driven by…

Environmental heterogeneity can drive genetic heterogeneity in expanding populations; mutant strains may emerge that trade overall growth rate for an improved ability to survive in patches that are hostile to the wild type. This…

Until recently, much of the microbial world was hidden from view. A global research effort has changed this, unveiling and quantifying microbial diversity across enormous range of critically-important contexts, from the human microbiome, to…

Developmental bias plays a major role in phenotypic evolution. Some researchers have argued that phenotypes, regulated by development, can only evolve along restricted trajectory under certain scenarios, such as the case for mammalian molar…

A major aim of evolutionary biology is to explain the respective roles of adaptive versus non-adaptive changes in the evolution of complexity. While selection is certainly responsible for the spread and maintenance of complex phenotypes,…

We consider a stochastic individual-based model of adaptive dynamics for an asexually reproducing population with mutation. Biologically motivated by the influence of seasons or the variation of drug concentration during medical treatment,…

We study an abstract model for the co-evolution between mutating viruses and the adaptive immune system. In sequence space, these two populations are localized around transiently dominant strains. Delocalization or error thresholds exhibit…

We study a stochastic community model able to interpolate from a neutral regime to a niche partitioned regime upon varying a single parameter tuning the intensity of niche stabilization, namely the difference between intraspecific and…

Natural microbial populations often have complex spatial structures. This can impact their evolution, in particular the ability of mutants to take over. While mutant fixation probabilities are known to be unaffected by sufficiently…

Within the framework of population genetics we consider the evolution of an asexual haploid population under the effect of a rapidly varying natural selection (microevolution). We focus on the case in which the environment exerting…

The relationship between sequences and secondary structures or shapes in RNA exhibits robust statistical properties summarized by three notions: (1) the notion of a typical shape (that among all sequences of fixed length certain shapes are…

Sensory mechanisms in biology, from cells to humans, have the property of adaptivity, whereby the response produced by the sensor is adapted to the overall amplitude of the signal; reducing the sensitivity in the presence of strong…

We analyze the long-term stability of a stochastic model designed to illustrate the adaptation of a population to variation in its environment. A piecewise-deterministic process modeling adaptation is coupled to a Feller logistic diffusion…

The role of dispersal on the stability and synchrony of a metacommunity is a topic of considerable interest in theoretical ecology. Dispersal is known to promote both synchrony, which enhances the likelihood of extinction, and spatial…

The composition of ecological communities varies not only between different locations but also in time. Understanding the fundamental processes that drive species towards rarity or abundance is crucial to assessing ecosystem resilience and…

Evolutionary dynamics is often viewed as a subtle process of change accumulation that causes a divergence among organisms and their genomes. However, this interpretation is an inheritance of a gradualistic view that has been challenged at…

Biological phenotypes are products of complex evolutionary processes in which selective forces influence multiple biological trait measurements in unknown ways. Phylogenetic factor analysis disentangles these relationships across the…