Related papers: Bacterial evolution and the Bak-Sneppen model
This review is an introduction to theoretical models and mathematical calculations for biological evolution, aimed at physicists. The methods in the field are naturally very similar to those used in statistical physics, although the…
These short notes collect some thoughts about the way Butcher-Oemler-like and evolutionary studies are performed. We emphasize the shortcomings of several overlooked technical ingredients in the above type of studies, with the hope of…
The impact of environmental fluctuation on species diversity is studied with a model of the evolutionary ecology of microorganisms. We show that environmental fluctuation induces evolutionary branching and assures the consequential…
In this article a kinetic model for the dynamics of myxobacteria colonies on flat surfaces is investigated. The model is based on the kinetic equation for collective bacteria dynamics introduced in arXiv:2001.02711, which is based on the…
Recent research has extended methods from the fields of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics into other disciplines. Most notably, one recent work creates a unified theoretical framework to understand evolutionary biology, machine…
We consider two, apparently similar, models of biological evolution which have been claimed to exhibit self-organized critical behaviour. A careful reanalysis of these models, including several new analytic results for one of them, suggests…
We present a two-species population model in a well-mixed environment where the dynamics involves, in addition to birth and death, changes due to environmental factors and inter-species interactions. The novel dynamical components are…
We study the interplay of population growth and evolutionary dynamics using a stochastic model based on birth and death events. In contrast to the common assumption of an independent population size, evolution can be strongly affected by…
Protein distributions measured under a broad set of conditions in bacteria and yeast were shown to exhibit a common skewed shape, with variances depending quadratically on means. For bacteria these properties were reproduced by temporal…
Bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics by a multitude of mechanisms. A central, yet unsolved question is how resistance evolution affects cell growth at different drug levels. Here we develop a fitness model that predicts growth rates of…
Mathematical modeling and analysis can provide insight on the dynamics of ecosystems which maintain biodiversity in the face of competitive and prey-predator interactions. Of primary interests are the underlying structure and features which…
Evolutionary experiments with microbes are a powerful tool to study mutations and natural selection. These experiments, however, are often limited to the well-mixed environments of a test tube or a chemostat. Since spatial organization can…
Biological evolution in a sequence space with random fitnesses is studied within Eigen's quasispecies model. A strong selection limit is employed, in which the population resides at a single sequence at all times. Evolutionary trajectories…
We study the discrete-time evolution of a transformation on a set of probability measures that is up-dated combining independently the marginals on the atoms of partitions. This model was recently introduced in Baake, Baake and Salamat…
Boolean networks may be viewed as idealizations of biological genetic networks, where each node is represented by an on-off switch which is a function of the binary output from some other nodes. We evolve connectivity in a single Boolean…
A model describing the dynamics related to the spreading of non-lethal infectious diseases in a fixed-size population is proposed. The model consists of a non-linear delay-differential equation describing the time evolution of the increment…
Is evolution always gradual or can it make leaps? We examine a mathematical model of an evolutionary process on a fitness landscape and obtain analytic solutions for the probability of multi-mutation leaps, that is, several mutations…
Motivated by recent research of aging in E. coli, we explore the effects of aging on bacterial fitness. The disposable soma theory of aging was developed to explain how differences in lifespans and aging rates could be linked to life…
To maintain a constant cell size, dividing cells have to coordinate cell cycle events with cell growth. This coordination has for long been supposed to rely on the existence of size thresholds determining cell cycle progression [1]. In…
Motivated by the existence of remarkably ordered cluster arrays of bacteria colonies growing in Petri dishes and related problems, we study the spontaneous emergence of clustering and patterns in a simple nonequilibrium system: the…