Related papers: Non-genetic variability: survival strategy or nuis…
Understanding the coexistence of diverse species in a changing environment is an important problem in community ecology. Bet-hedging is a strategy that helps species survive in such changing environments. However, studies of bet-hedging…
In both natural and artificial studies, evolution is often seen as synonymous to natural selection. Individuals evolve under pressures set by environments that are either reset or do not carry over significant changes from previous…
Both evolution and ecology have long been concerned with the impact of variable environmental conditions on observed levels of genetic diversity within and between species. We model the evolution of a quantitative trait under selection that…
Resource are often not uniformly distributed within a population. Spatial variations of concentration of a resource, change the fitness of competing strategies locally. The notion of fitness varying with respect to both genotype and…
The evolution of two species with different fitness is investigated on degree-heterogeneous graphs. The population evolves either by one individual dying and being replaced by the offspring of a random neighbor (voter model (VM) dynamics)…
We introduce and analyse an individual-based evolutionary model, in which a population of genetically diverse organisms compete with each other for limited resources. Through theoretical analysis and stochastic simulations, we show that the…
The dynamics of adaptation is difficult to predict because it is highly stochastic even in large populations. The uncertainty emerges from number fluctuations, called genetic drift, arising in the small number of particularly fit…
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…
While Neutral Theory famously describes the number of discrete genetic differences in populations, we consider the number of genetic backgrounds under which such differences are observed - setting limits to the generalizability of their…
Recent evidence suggests that nongenetic (epigenetic) mechanisms play an important role at all stages of cancer evolution. In many cancers, these mechanisms have been observed to induce dynamic switching between two or more cell states,…
We are living in an uncertain and dynamically changing world, where optimal decision-making under uncertainty is directly linked to the survival of species. However, evolutionary selection pressures that shape value-based decision-making…
This paper shows that differentiating the lifetimes of two phenotypes independently from their fertility can lead to a qualitative change in the equilibrium of a population: since survival and reproduction are distinct functional aspects of…
In contrast to the neutral population cycles of the deterministic mean-field Lotka--Volterra rate equations, including spatial structure and stochastic noise in models for predator-prey interactions yields complex spatio-temporal structures…
Mutations in a microbial population can increase the frequency of a genotype not only by increasing its exponential growth rate, but also by decreasing its lag time or adjusting the yield (resource efficiency). The contribution of multiple…
A simulation model of a population having internal (genetic) structure is presented. The population is subject to selection pressure coming from the environment which is the same in the whole system but changes in time. Reproduction has a…
Environmental variations can significantly influence how populations compete for resources, and hence shape their evolution. Here, we study population dynamics subject to a fluctuating environment modeled by a varying carrying capacity…
If two species exhibit different nonlinear responses to a single shared resource, and if each species modifies the resource dynamics such that this favors its competitor, they may stably coexist. This coexistence mechanism, known as…
Single-cell experiments have revealed cell-to-cell variability in generation times and growth rates for genetically identical cells. Theoretical models relating the fluctuating generation times of single cells to the population growth rate…
Phenotypic plasticity and its evolution may help evolutionary rescue in a novel and stressful environment, especially if environmental novelty reveals cryptic genetic variation that enables the evolution of increased plasticity. However,…
Understanding how stochastic and non-linear deterministic processes interact is a major challenge in population dynamics theory. After a short review, we introduce a stochastic individual-centered particle model to describe the evolution in…