Related papers: Information and fitness in two-state systems: self…
Predicting fitness of biologically-active populations, communities or systems in fluctuating environments is a long-standing challenge. Phenotypic plasticity and bet-hedging strategy, two key evolutionary traits living systems harness to…
Phenotype-switching with and without sensing environment is a ubiquitous strategy of organisms to survive in fluctuating environment. Fitness of a population of organisms with phenotype-switching may be constrained and restricted by hidden…
Hysteresis and bet-hedging (random choice of phenotypes) are two different observations typically linked with multiplicity of phenotypes in biological systems. Hysteresis can be viewed as form of the system's persistent memory of past…
Adaptation in a fluctuating environment is a process of fueling environmental information to gain fitness. Living systems have gradually developed strategies for adaptation from random and passive diversification of the phenotype to more…
Resource are often not uniformly distributed within a population. Spatial variations of concentration of a resource, change the fitness of competing strategies locally. The notion of fitness varying with respect to both genotype and…
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…
Is there an advantage to heterogeneity in a population where individuals grow and divide by fission? This is a broad question, to which there is no easy universal answer. This article aims to provide a quantitative answer in the specific…
The concept of fitness as a measure for a species's success in natural selection is central to the theory of evolution. We here investigate how reproduction rates which are not constant but vary in response to environmental fluctuations,…
We study a minimal model for the growth of a phenotypically heterogeneous population of cells subject to a fluctuating environment in which they can replicate (by exploiting available resources) and modify their phenotype within a given…
Biologists measure information in different ways. Neurobiologists and researchers in bioinformatics often measure information using information-theoretic measures such as Shannon's entropy or mutual information. Behavioral biologists and…
We observe the propagation of information in a system of self-replicating strings of code (``Artificial Life'') as a function of fitness and mutation rate. Comparison with theoretical predictions based on the reaction-diffusion equation…
Biological organisms have to cope with stochastic variations in both the external environment and the internal population dynamics. Theoretical studies and laboratory experiments suggest that population diversification could be an effective…
Many biological systems regulate phenotypic heterogeneity as a fitness-maximising strategy in uncertain and dynamic environments. Analysis of such strategies is typically confined both to a discrete set of environmental conditions, and to a…
Due to stochastic fluctuations arising from finite population size, known as genetic drift, the ability of a population to explore a rugged fitness landscape depends on its size. In the weak mutation regime, while the mean steady-state…
Mutual information and its causal variant, directed information, have been widely used to quantitatively characterize the performance of biological sensing and information transduction. However, once coupled with selection in response to…
In a co-evolutionary context, the survive probability of individual elements of a system depends on their relation with their neighbors. The natural selection process depends on the whole population, which is determined by local events…
The growth rate of organisms depends both on external conditions and on internal states, such as the expression levels of various genes. We show that to achieve a criterion mean growth rate over an ensemble of conditions, the internal…
In biology and ecology, individuals or communities of individuals living in unpredictable environments often alternate between different evolutionary strategies to spread and reduce risks. Such behavior is commonly referred to as…
Emerging empirical and theoretical thinking about human aging places considerable value upon the role of the environment as a major factor which can promote prolonged healthy longevity. Our contemporary, information-rich environment is…
We consider a model for a population in a heterogeneous environment, with logistic type local population dynamics, under the assumption that individuals can switch between two different nonzero rates of diffusion. Such switching behavior…