Related papers: Biological evolution through mutation, selection, …
The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot be used to evaluate the truth value of the following proposition: Through evolution, there exists at least one species that can adapt to any one given environment. To address this issue,…
Population genetics lies at the heart of evolutionary theory. This topic forms part of many biological science curricula but is rarely taught to physics students. Since physicists are becoming increasingly interested in biological…
We prove the existence and uniqueness of a quasi-stationary distribution for three stochastic processes derived from the model of Muller's ratchet. This model was invented with the aim of evaluating the limitations of an asexual…
Consider a population of $N$ individuals, each of them carrying a type in $\mathbb N_0$. The population evolves according to a Moran dynamics with selection and mutation, where an individual of type $k$ has the same selective advantage over…
Coevolving and competing species or game-theoretic strategies exhibit rich and complex dynamics for which a general theoretical framework based on finite populations is still lacking. Recently, an explicit mean-field description in the form…
Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…
We consider a stochastic individual-based model of adaptive dynamics for an asexually reproducing population with mutation. Biologically motivated by the influence of seasons or the variation of drug concentration during medical treatment,…
We consider the evolutionary trajectories traced out by an infinite population undergoing mutation-selection dynamics in static, uncorrelated random fitness landscapes. Starting from the population that consists of a single genotype, the…
BACKGROUND: An important question is whether evolution favors properties such as mutational robustness or evolvability that do not directly benefit any individual, but can influence the course of future evolution. Functionally similar…
Mutations in a microbial population can increase the frequency of a genotype not only by increasing its exponential growth rate, but also by decreasing its lag time or adjusting the yield (resource efficiency). The contribution of multiple…
In large asexual populations, multiple beneficial mutations arise in the population, compete, interfere with each other, and accumulate on the same genome, before any of them fix. The resulting dynamics, although studied by many authors, is…
The interplay between mutation and selection plays a fundamental role in the behaviour of evolutionary algorithms (EAs). However, this interplay is still not completely understood. This paper presents a rigorous runtime analysis of a…
Environmental changes greatly influence the evolution of populations. Here, we study the dynamics of a population of two strains, one growing slightly faster than the other, competing for resources in a time-varying binary environment…
One of the main properties of biological systems is modularity, which manifests itself at all levels of their organization, starting with the level of molecular genetics, ending with the level of whole organisms and their communities. In a…
Since protein mutations are the main driving force of evolution at the molecular level, a proper analysis of them (and the factors controlling them) will enable us to find a response to several crucial queries in evolutionary biology. Among…
This is an introductory review of deterministic mutation-selection models for asexual populations (i.e., quasispecies theory) and related topics. First, the basic concepts of fitness, mutations, and sequence space are introduced. Different…
Motivated by modeling the dynamics of a population living in a flowing medium where the environmental factors are random in space, we have studied an asymmetric variant of the one-dimensional contact process, where the quenched random…
If deleterious mutations near a fitness maximum in a spatially distributed population are sufficiently frequent or detrimental, the population can undergo a fitness collapse, similarly to the Muller's ratchet effect in well-mixed…
Mixed microbial communities, usually composed of various bacterial and fungal species, are fundamental in a plethora of environments, from soil to human gut and skin. Their evolution is a paradigmatic example of intertwined dynamics, where…
Muller's ratchet, in its prototype version, models a haploid, asexual population whose size~$N$ is constant over the generations. Slightly deleterious mutations are acquired along the lineages at a constant rate, and individuals carrying…