Related papers: Neutral Diversity in Experimental Metapopulations
We introduce a minimal model of multilevel selection on structured populations, considering the interplay between game theory and population dynamics. Through a bottleneck process, finite groups are formed with cooperators and defectors…
Risk spreading in bacterial populations is generally regarded as a strategy to maximize survival. Here, we study its role during range expansion of a genetically diverse population where growth and motility are two alternative traits. We…
Bacterial chemotaxis systems are as diverse as the environments that bacteria inhabit, but how much environmental variation can cells tolerate with a single system? Diversification of a single chemotaxis system could serve as an…
Despite its radical assumption of ecological equivalence between species, neutral biodiversity theory can often provide good fits to species abundance distributions observed in nature. Major criticisms of neutral theory have focused on…
We present a statistical model of bacterial evolution based on the coupling between codon usage and tRNA abundance. Such a model interprets this aspect of the evolutionary process as a balance between the codon homogenization effect due to…
In bacterial populations, cells are able to cooperate in order to yield complex collective functionalities. Interest in population-level cellular behaviour is increasing, due to both our expanding knowledge of the underlying biological…
One of the first successes of neutral ecology was to predict realistically-broad distributions of rare and abundant species. However, it has remained an outstanding theoretical challenge to describe how this distribution of abundances…
We introduce and analyze a general model of a population evolving over a network of selectively neutral genotypes. We show that the population's limit distribution on the neutral network is solely determined by the network topology and…
The notion of (auto) catalytic networks has become a cornerstone in understanding the possibility of a sudden dramatic increase of diversity in biological evolution as well as in the evolution of social and economical systems. Here we study…
Many types of bacteria can survive under stress by switching stochastically between two different phenotypes: the "normals" who multiply fast, but are vulnerable to stress, and the "persisters" who hardly multiply, but are resilient to…
We consider a neutral dynamical model of biological diversity, where individuals live and reproduce independently. They have i.i.d. lifetime durations (which are not necessarily exponentially distributed) and give birth (singly) at constant…
We study time continuous branching processes with exponentially distributed lifetimes, with two types of cells that proliferate according to binary fission. A range of possible system dynamics are considered, each of which is characterized…
The evolution of multicellularity was a major transition in the history of life on earth. Conditions under which multicellularity is favored have been studied theoretically and experimentally. But since the construction of a multicellular…
We investigate the mutation-selection dynamics for an evolutionary computation model based on Turing Machines that we introduced in a previous article. The use of Turing Machines allows for very simple mechanisms of code growth and code…
We describe a continuous-time modelling framework for biological population dynamics that accounts for demographic noise. In the spirit of the methodology used by statistical physicists, transitions between the states of the system are…
The goal of this article is to contribute towards the conceptual and quantitative understanding of the evolutionary benefits for (microbial) populations to maintain a seed bank (consisting of dormant individuals) when facing fluctuating…
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…
Can prelife proceed without cell division? A recently proposed mechanism suggests that transient compartmentalization could have preceded cell division in prebiotic scenarios. Here, we study transient compartmentalization dynamics in the…
We study the dynamics of a population subject to selective pressures, evolving either on RNA neutral networks or in toy fitness landscapes. We discuss the spread and the neutrality of the population in the steady state. Different limits…
There is a pressing need to better understand how microbial populations respond to antimicrobial drugs, and to find mechanisms to possibly eradicate antimicrobial-resistant cells. The inactivation of antimicrobials by resistant microbes can…