Related papers: Short-Range Migration Can Alter Evolutionary Dynam…
In this thesis we develop minimal models of the relationship between motility, growth, and evolution of cancer cells. We utilise simple simulations of a population of individual cells in space to examine how changes in mechanical properties…
Most cancers in humans are large, measuring centimeters in diameter, composed of many billions of cells. An equivalent mass of normal cells would be highly heterogeneous as a result of the mutations that occur during each cell division.…
The colonization of unoccupied territory by invading species, known as range expansion, is a spatially heterogeneous non-equilibrium growth process. We introduce a two-species Eden growth model to analyze the interplay between…
We present a simple model of adaptive radiations in evolution based on species competition. Competition is found to promote species divergence and branching, and to dampen the net species production. In the model simulations, high taxonomic…
Horizontal transfer (HT) of heritable information or `traits' (carried by genetic elements, endosymbionts, or culture) is widespread among living organisms. Yet current ecological and evolutionary theory addressing HT is limited. We present…
Many physical and natural systems, including the population of species, evolve in habitats with spatial stochastic variations of the individuals' motility. We study here the effect of those fluctuations on invasion and genetic loss. A…
Theory predicts rapid genetic drift during invasions, yet many expanding populations maintain high genetic diversity. We find that genetic drift is dramatically suppressed when dispersal rates increase with the population density because…
Population expansions trigger many biomedical and ecological transitions, from tumor growth to invasions of non-native species. Although population spreading often selects for more invasive phenotypes, we show that this outcome is far from…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. It is well known that population structure can affect evolutionary dynamics. Traditionally, natural selection is studied between mutants that differ in reproductive rate, but are…
We study the effect of intratumor heterogeneity in the likelihood of cancer cells moving from a primary tumor to other sites in the human body, generating a metastatic process. We model different scenarios of competition between tumor cells…
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…
We consider the effect of network structure on the evolution of a population. Models of this kind typically consider a population of fixed size and distribution. Here we consider eco-evolutionary dynamics where population size and…
Agent-based simulations are essential for studying cooperation on spatial networks. However, finite-size effects -- random fluctuations due to limited network sizes -- can cause certain strategies to unexpectedly dominate or disappear,…
The entanglement of population dynamics, evolution, and adaptive radiation for species competing for resources is studied. For resource harvesting, we modify the model used in Ref. Phys. Rev. Lett. 118 048103 and introduce new resource…
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…
Selective sweeps affect neutral genetic diversity through hitchhiking. While this effect is limited to the local genomic region of the sweep in panmictic populations, we find that in spatially-extended populations the combined effects of…
We investigate the exploration of rugged fitness landscapes by spatially structured populations with demes on the nodes of a graph, connected by migrations. In the rare migration regime, we find that finite structures can adapt more…
Species introductions to new habitats can cause a decline in the population size of competing native species and consequently also in their genetic diversity. We are interested in why these adverse effects are weak in some cases whereas in…
We consider a mutation-selection model of a population structured by the spatial variables and a trait variable which is the diffusion rate. Competition for resource is local in spatial variables, but nonlocal in the trait variable. We…
Does a high dispersal rate provide a competitive advantage when risking competitive exclusion? To this day, the theoretical literature cannot answer this question in full generality. The present paper focuses on the simplest mathematical…