Related papers: Does Good Mutation Help You Live Longer?
We consider neutral evolution of a large population subject to changes in its population size. For a population with a time-variable carrying capacity we have computed the distributions of the total branch lengths of its sample genealogies.…
Biological aging is characterized by an age-dependent increase in the probability of death and by a decrease in the reproductive capacity. Individual age-dependent rates of survival and reproduction have a strong impact on population…
Which factors govern the evolution of mutation rates and emergence of species? Here, we address this question using a first principles model of life where population dynamics of asexual organisms is coupled to molecular properties and…
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…
Population genetic studies have found evidence for dramatic population growth in recent human history. It is unclear how this recent population growth, combined with the effects of negative natural selection, has affected patterns of…
We study the maturation of the antibody population following primary antigen presentation as a global optimization problem. Emphasis is placed on the trade-off between the safety of mutations that lead to local improvements to the…
The mutation rate of a well adapted population is prone to reduction so as to have a lower mutational load. We aim to understand the role of epistatic interactions between the fitness affecting mutations in this process. Using a multitype…
Evolutionary branching is analysed in a stochastic, individual-based population model under mutation and selection. In such models, the common assumption is that individual reproduction and life career are characterised by values of a…
Adaptation often involves the acquisition of a large number of genomic changes which arise as mutations in single individuals. In asexual populations, combinations of mutations can fix only when they arise in the same lineage, but for…
When beneficial mutations are relatively common, competition between multiple unfixed mutations can reduce the rate of fixation in well-mixed asexual populations. We introduce a one dimensional model with a steady accumulation of beneficial…
Environment plays a fundamental role in the competition for resources, and hence in the evolution of populations. Here, we study a well-mixed, finite population consisting of two strains competing for the limited resources provided by an…
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…
Biological fitness is not an observable quantity and must be inferred from population dynamics. Bayesian inference applied to the Moran process and variants yields a robust inference method that can infer fitness in populations evolving via…
Several studies question the adaptive value of female preferences for older males. Theory and evidence show that older males carry more deleterious mutations in their sperm than younger males carry. These mutations are not visible to…
Population expansions trigger many biomedical and ecological transitions, from tumor growth to invasions of non-native species. Although population spreading often selects for more invasive phenotypes, we show that this outcome is far from…
Will the United Kingdom's ageing population be fit and independent, or suffer from greater chronic ill health? Healthy life expectancy is commonly used to assess this: it is an estimate of how many years are lived in good health over the…
We consider two versions of stochastic population models with mutation and selection. The first approach relies on a multitype branching process; here, individuals reproduce and change type (i.e., mutate) independently of each other,…
We investigate the effect of spatial range expansions on the evolution of fitness when beneficial and deleterious mutations co-segregate. We perform individual-based simulations of a uniform linear habitat and complement them with…
We consider the evolution of a population of fixed size with no selection. The number of generations $G$ to reach the first common ancestor evolves in time. This evolution can be described by a simple Markov process which allows one to…
Organisms that exploit different environments may experience a stochastic delay in adjusting their fitness when they switch habitats. We study two species whose fitness is determined by the species composition of the local environment, as…