Related papers: Interaction between directional epistasis and aver…
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…
Protein evolution involves mutations occurring across a wide range of time scales. In analogy with disordered systems in statistical physics, this dynamical heterogeneity suggests strong correlations between mutations happening at distinct…
We introduce a new model of evolution on a fitness landscape possessing a tunable degree of neutrality. The model allows us to study the general properties of molecular species undergoing neutral evolution. We find that a number of…
Most new mutations are deleterious and are eventually eliminated by natural selection. But in an adapting population, the rapid amplification of beneficial mutations can hinder the removal of deleterious variants in nearby regions of the…
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…
We study how the interplay between the memory immune response and pathogen mutation affects epidemic dynamics in two related models. The first explicitly models pathogen mutation and individual memory immune responses, with contacted…
Dominance is usually considered a constant value that describes the relative difference in fitness or phenotype between heterozygotes and the average of homozygotes at a focal polymorphic locus. However, the observed dominance can vary with…
We investigate a selection-mutation model for the dynamics of technological innovation,a special case of reaction-diffusion equations. Although mutations are assumed to increase the variety of technologies, not their average success…
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…
Fitness landscapes provide a quantitative framework for understanding how natural selection shapes evolutionary trajectories. A central feature of these landscapes is their number of local optima, which determines whether fitness-increasing…
An elastic spring network is an example of evolvable matter. It can be pruned to couple separated pairs of nodes so that when a strain is applied to one of them, the other responds either in-phase or out-of-phase. This produces two pruned…
The evolution of antimicrobial resistance generally occurs in an environment where antimicrobial concentration is variable, which has dramatic consequences on the microorganisms' fitness landscape, and thus on the evolution of resistance.…
We investigate the fitness advantage associated with the robustness of a phenotype against deleterious mutations using deterministic mutation-selection models of quasispecies type equipped with a mesa shaped fitness landscape. We obtain…
We consider the dynamics of a non-recombining haploid population of finite size which accumulates deleterious mutations irreversibly. This ratchet like process occurs at a finite speed in the absence of epistasis, but it has been suggested…
The accumulation of beneficial mutations on many competing genetic backgrounds in rapidly adapting populations has a striking impact on evolutionary dynamics. This effect, known as clonal interference, causes erratic fluctuations in the…
We study the evolutionary dynamics of an asexual population of nonmutators and mutators on a class of epistatic fitness landscapes. We consider the situation in which all mutations are deleterious and mutators are produced from nonmutators…
A common view in evolutionary biology is that mutation rates are minimised. However, studies in combinatorial optimisation and search have shown a clear advantage of using variable mutation rates as a control parameter to optimise the…
Linked beneficial and deleterious mutations are known to decrease the fixation probability of a favorable mutation in large asexual populations. While the hindering effect of strongly deleterious mutations on adaptive evolution has been…
In unicellular organisms such as bacteria and in most viruses, mutations mainly occur during reproduction. Thus, genotypes with a high birth rate should have a higher mutation rate. However, standard models of asexual adaptation such as the…
Epistasis (gene-gene interaction) is crucial to predicting genetic disease. Our work tackles the computational challenges faced by previous works in epistasis detection by modeling it as a one-step Markov Decision Process where the state is…