Related papers: Laboratory biases hinder Eco-Evo-Devo integration:…
How adaptive evolution to one environmental stress improves or suppresses adaptation to another is an important problem in evolutionary biology. For instance, in microbiology, the evolution of bacteria to be resistant to different…
The dynamic nature of life's ability to thrive in diverse and changing planetary environments suggests that habitability and survival depend on the evolutionary path and life adaptation to environmental conditions. Here we explore such…
Our understanding of evolution is shaped strongly by how we conceive of its fundamental causes. In the original Modern Synthesis, evolution was defined as a process of shifting the frequencies of available alleles at many loci affecting a…
Previous evolutionary studies demonstrated how evaluating evolving agents in variable environmental conditions enable them to develop solutions that are robust to environmental variation. We demonstrate how the robustness of the agents can…
Biological evolution of a population is governed by the fitness landscape, which is a map from genotype to fitness. However, a fitness landscape depends on the organisms environment, and evolution in changing environments is still poorly…
Social dilemmas are an integral part of social interactions. Cooperative actions, ranging from secreting extra-cellular products in microbial populations to donating blood in humans, are costly to the actor and hence create an incentive to…
1. Theoretical models pertaining to feedbacks between ecological and evolutionary processes are prevalent in multiple biological fields. An integrative overview is currently lacking, due to little crosstalk between the fields and the use of…
Eco-evolutionary dynamics, or eco-evolution for short, are thought to involve rapid demography (ecology) and equally rapid phenotypic changes (evolution) leading to novel, emergent system behaviours. This focus on contemporary dynamics is…
Eco-evolutionary game dynamics which characterizes the mutual interactions and the coupled evolutions of strategies and environments has been of growing interests in very recent years. Since such feedback loops widely exist in a range of…
We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…
Microbial populations generally evolve in volatile environments, under conditions fluctuating between harsh and mild, e.g. as the result of sudden changes in toxin concentration or nutrient abundance. Environmental variability thus shapes…
What is motivation and how does it work? Where do goals come from and how do they vary within and between species and individuals? Why do we prefer some things over others? MEDO is a theoretical framework for understanding these questions…
Laboratory experiments with bacterial colonies, under well-controlled conditions often lead to evolutionary diversification, where at least two ecotypes emerge from an initially monomorphic population. Empirical evidence suggests that such…
One of many important features of the tumour microenvironment is that it is a place of active Darwinian selection where different tumour clones become adapted to the variety of ecological niches that make up the microenvironment. These…
Much of our understanding of ecological and evolutionary mechanisms derives from analysis of low-dimensional models: with few interacting species, or few axes defining "fitness". It is not always clear to what extent the intuition derived…
Spatial extent is a complicating factor in mathematical biology. The possibility that an action at point A cannot immediately affect what happens at point B creates the opportunity for spatial nonuniformity. This nonuniformity must change…
In complex ecosystems such as microbial communities, there is constant ecological and evolutionary feedback between the residing species and the environment occurring on concurrent timescales. Species respond and adapt to their surroundings…
Mixed microbial communities, usually composed of various bacterial and fungal species, are fundamental in a plethora of environments, from soil to human gut and skin. Their evolution is a paradigmatic example of intertwined dynamics, where…
Microbial ecosystems are commonly modeled by fixed interactions between species in steady exponential growth states. However, microbes often modify their environments so strongly that they are forced out of the exponential state into…
The impact of environmental fluctuation on species diversity is studied with a model of the evolutionary ecology of microorganisms. We show that environmental fluctuation induces evolutionary branching and assures the consequential…