Related papers: Fixation and extinction in time-fluctuating spatia…
We study a general setting of neutral evolution in which the population is of finite, constant size and can have spatial structure. Mutation leads to different genetic types ("traits"), which can be discrete or continuous. Under minimal…
The motility of eukaryotic cells is strongly influenced by their environment, with confined cells often developing qualitatively different motility patterns from those migrating on simple two-dimensional substrates. Recent experiments,…
The question of whether biological populations survive or are eventually driven to extinction has long been examined using mathematical models. In this work we study population survival or extinction using a stochastic, discrete…
We study fixation probabilities and times as a consequence of neutral genetic drift in subdivided populations, motivated by a model of the cultural evolutionary process of language change that is described by the same mathematics as the…
The dynamics of a two-species community of $N$ competing individuals is considered, with an emphasis on the role of environmental variations that affect coherently the fitness of entire populations. The chance of fixation of a mutant…
Environmental stochasticity is known to be a destabilizing factor, increasing abundance fluctuations and extinction rates of populations. However, the stability of a community may benefit from the differential response of species to…
This chapter provides a pedagogical introduction and overview of spatial and temporal correlation and fluctuation effects resulting from the fundamentally stochastic kinetics underlying chemical reactions and the dynamics of populations or…
Turbulence has been recognized as a factor of paramount importance for the survival or extinction of sinking phytoplankton species. However, dealing with its multiscale nature in models of coupled fluid and biological dynamics is a…
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…
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…
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…
Frequency dependent selection and demographic fluctuations play important roles in evolutionary and ecological processes. Under frequency dependent selection, the average fitness of the population may increase or decrease based on…
Ecology and evolution under changing environments are important in many subfields of biology with implications for medicine. Here, we explore an example: the consequences of fluctuating environments on the emergence of antibiotic…
Understanding how cooperation can evolve in populations despite its cost to individual cooperators is an important challenge. Models of spatially structured populations with one individual per node of a graph have shown that cooperation,…
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,…
We study the extinction risk of a fragmented population residing on a network of patches coupled by migration, where the local patch dynamics include the Allee effect. We show that mixing between patches dramatically influences the…
Evolutionary games on graphs describe how strategic interactions and population structure determine evolutionary success, quantified by the probability that a single mutant takes over a population. Graph structures, compared to the…
In ecology, species can mitigate their extinction risks in uncertain environments by diversifying individual phenotypes. This observation is quantified by the theory of bet-hedging, which provides a reason for the degree of phenotypic…
We present a model for a biological reactor in which bacteria tend to aggregate in flocs, as encountered in wastewater treatment plants. The influence of this flocculation on the growth dynamics of the bacteria is studied. We argue that a…
How long does it take for an initially advantageous mutant to establish itself in a resident population, and what does the population composition look like then? We approach these questions in the framework of the so called Bare Bones…