Related papers: Coexistence vs collapse in transposon populations
Ecological trade-offs between species are often invoked to explain species coexistence in ecological communities. However, few mathematical models have been proposed for which coexistence conditions can be characterized explicitly in terms…
In mathematical population genetics, it is well known that one can represent the genealogy of a population by a tree, which indicates how the ancestral lines of individuals in the population coalesce as they are traced back in time. As the…
I study a population model in which the reproduction rate lambda is inherited with mutation, favoring fast reproducers in the short term, but conflicting with a process that eliminates agglomerations of individuals. The model is a variant…
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…
Feedbacks between evolution and ecology are ubiquitous, with ecological interactions determining which mutants are successful, and these mutants in turn modifying community structure. We study the evolutionary dynamics of several ecological…
With a view to connecting random mutation on the molecular level to punctuated equilibrium behavior on the phenotype level, we propose a new model for biological evolution, which incorporates random mutation and natural selection. In this…
The coalescent is a stochastic process representing ancestral lineages in a population undergoing neutral genetic drift. Originally defined for a well-mixed population, the coalescent has been adapted in various ways to accommodate spatial,…
Many natural ecosystems harbor large numbers of coexisting species competing for far fewer distinct resources, in apparent defiance of the competitive exclusion principle. Various mechanisms have been proposed to explain this apparent…
Multicellular organisms comprise a diverse collection of stable tissues built from different cell types. It remains unclear how large numbers of interacting cells can precisely coordinate their gene expression during tissue…
Intragenomic recombination (crossover) is a very important evolutionary mechanism. The crossover events are not evenly distributed along the natural chromosomes. Monte Carlo simulations revealed that frequency of recombinations decides…
The coupling between evolutionary and ecological changes (eco-evolutionary dynamics) has been shown to be relevant among diverse species, and is also of interest outside of ecology, i.e. in cancer evolution. These dynamics play an important…
Prion and prion-like molecules are a type of self replicating aggregate protein that have been implicated in a variety of neurodegenerative diseases. Over recent decades the molecular dynamics of prions have been characterized both…
Recently, a first step was made by the authors towards a systematic investigation of the effect of reaction-step-size noise - uncertainty in the step size of the reaction - on the dynamics of stochastic populations. This was done by…
Mechanisms leading to speciation are a major focus in evolutionary biology. In this paper, we present and study a stochastic model of population where individuals, with type a or A, are equivalent from ecological, demographical and spatial…
Microbial ecosystems are commonly modeled by fixed interactions between species in steady exponential growth states. However, microbes often modify their environments so strongly that they are forced out of the exponential state into…
Here, we address the essential question of whether, in the context of evolving populations, ecosystems attain properties that enable persistence of the ecosystem itself. We use a simple ecosystem model describing resource, producer, and…
Species experience both internal feedbacks with endogenous factors such as trait evolution and external feedbacks with exogenous factors such as weather. These feedbacks can play an important role in determining whether populations persist…
The spread of infectious disease and the evolution of antigenically distinct strains are often modeled separately, despite strong feedbacks mediated by host immune memory and heterogeneous contacts. To tackle this challenging problem, we…
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 Tangled Nature model of macro evolution and demonstrate that the co-evolutionary dynamics produces an increasingly correlated core of well occupied types. At the same time the entire configuration of types becomes increasing…