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Stochastic chemical reaction or population dynamics in finite systems often terminates in an absorbing state. Yet in large spatially extended systems, the time to reach species extinction (or fixation) becomes exceedingly long. Tuning…
Lately, experimental research on microbial symbioses based on nutrient exchange and interdependence has yielded a number of interesting findings, however an in-depth mathematical description of the exact underlying dynamics of such…
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…
Two mathematical models of macroevolution are studied. These models have population dynamics at the species level, and mutations and extinction of species are also included. The population dynamics are updated by difference equations with…
Statistical physics can describe the behavior of microbial populations consisting of many heterogeneous individuals. A direct consequence is the existence of phase transitions, where the behavior of a population changes discontinuously upon…
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 propose a hybrid dynamical system approach to model the evolution of a pathogen that experiences different selective pressures according to a stochastic process. In every environment, the evolution of the pathogen is described by a…
A macroscopic theory for describing cellular states during steady-growth is presented, which is based on the consistency between cellular growth and molecular replication, as well as the robustness of phenotypes against perturbations.…
Frequency-dependent selection reflects the interaction between different species as they battle for limited resources in their environment. In a stochastic evolutionary game the species relative fitnesses guides the evolutionary dynamics…
Organisms that exploit different environments may experience a stochastic delay in adjusting their fitness when they switch habitats. We study two species whose fitness is determined by the species composition of the local environment, as…
Phenotypic variation is a hallmark of cellular physiology. Metabolic heterogeneity, in particular, underpins single-cell phenomena such as microbial drug tolerance and growth variability. Much research has focussed on transcriptomic and…
Coevolutionary dynamics is investigated in chemical catalysis, biological evolution, social and economic systems. The dynamics of these systems can be analyzed within the unifying framework of evolutionary game theory. In this Letter, we…
Cooperative behavior is widespread in nature, even though cooperating individuals always run the risk to be exploited by free-riders. Population structure effectively promotes cooperation given that a threshold in the level of cooperation…
Between-species coevolution, and in particular antagonistic host-parasite coevolution, is a major process shaping within-species diversity. In this paper we investigate the role of various stochastic processes affecting the outcome of the…
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…
In complex ecological communities, species may self-organize into clusters or clumps where highly similar species can coexist. The emergence of such species clusters can be captured by the interplay between neutral and niche theories. Based…
Over the past century, nonlinear difference and differential equations have been used to understand conditions for species coexistence. However, these models fail to account for random fluctuations due to demographic and environmental…
Multiple phenotypic states often arise in a single cell with different gene-expression states that undergo transcription regulation with positive feedback. Recent experiments have shown that at least in E. coli, the gene state switching can…
Diverse biological networks exhibit universal features distinguished from those of random networks, calling much attention to their origins and implications. Here we propose a minimal evolution model of Boolean regulatory networks, which…
A mechanism of sympatric speciation is presented based on the interaction-induced developmental plasticity of phenotypes. First, phenotypes of individuals with identical genotypes split into a few groups, according to instability in the…