Related papers: Stochastic processes and host-parasite coevolution…
Genetic diversity is central to the process of evolution. Both natural selection and random genetic drift are influenced by the level of genetic diversity of a population; selection acts on diversity while drift samples from it. At a given…
When a biological population expands into new territory, genetic drift develops an enormous influence on evolution at the propagating front. In such range expansion processes, fluctuations in allele frequencies occur through stochastic…
Genetic variation in a population can sometimes arise so fast as to modify ecosystem dynamics. Such phenomena have been observed in natural predator-prey systems, and characterized in the laboratory as showing unusual phase relationships in…
We are interested in modeling Darwinian evolution resulting from the interplay of phenotypic variation and natural selection through ecological interactions. The population is modeled as a stochastic point process whose generator captures…
We are interested in the impact of natural selection in a prey-predator community. We introduce an individual-based model of the community that takes into account both prey and predator phenotypes. Our aim is to understand the phenotypic…
We study the competition between several advantageous mutants in an asexual population (clonal interference) as a function of the time between the appearance of the mutants, their selective advantages, and the rate of deleterious mutations.…
Bacteria and their bacteriophages are the most abundant, widespread and diverse groups of biological entities on the planet. In an attempt to understand how the interactions between bacteria, virulent phages and temperate phages might…
Understanding if and how mutants reach fixation in populations is an important question in evolutionary biology. We study the impact of population growth has on the success of mutants. To systematically understand the effects of growth we…
Transposons are small, self-replicating DNA sequences found in every branch of life. Often, one transposon will parasitize another, forming a tiny intracellular ecosystem. In some species these ecosystems thrive, while in others they go…
Pervasive natural selection can strongly influence observed patterns of genetic variation, but these effects remain poorly understood when multiple selected variants segregate in nearby regions of the genome. Classical population genetics…
This article deals with the emergence of a specific mating preference pattern called homogamy in a population. Individuals are characterized by their genotype at two haploid loci, and the population dynamics is modelled by a non-linear…
We study a model of stochastic evolutionary game dynamics in which the probabilities that agents choose suboptimal actions are dependent on payoff consequences. We prove a sample path large deviation principle, characterizing the rate of…
Cellular differentiation and evolution are stochastic processes that can involve multiple types (or states) of particles moving on a complex, high-dimensional state-space or "fitness" landscape. Cells of each specific type can thus be…
Synergistic and antagonistic interactions in multi-species populations - such as resource sharing and competition - result in remarkably diverse behaviors in populations of interacting cells, such as in soil or human microbiomes, or clonal…
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…
We consider a stochastic model for the evolution of a discrete population structured by a trait with values on a finite grid of the torus, and with mutation and selection. Traits are vertically inherited unless a mutation occurs, and…
Gene drive alleles bias their own inheritance to offspring. They can fix in a wild-type population in spite of a fitness cost, and even lead to the eradication of the target population if the fitness cost is high. However, this outcome may…
Weak purifying selection, acting on many linked mutations, may play a major role in shaping patterns of molecular evolution in natural populations. Yet efforts to infer these effects from DNA sequence data are limited by our incomplete…
Adaptation to changing environments is a hallmark of biological systems. Diversity in traits is necessary for adaptation and can influence the survival of a population faced with novelty. In habitats that remain stable over many…
Selection, mutation and random drift affect the dynamics of allele frequencies and consequently of quantitative traits. While the macroscopic dynamics of quantitative traits can be measured, the underlying allele frequencies are typically…