Related papers: Maternal effects in molecular evolution

The ability of organisms to accurately sense their environment and respond accordingly is critical for evolutionary success. However, exactly how the sensory ability influences fitness is a topic of active research, while the necessity of a…

The importance of mutator clones in the adaptive evolution of asexual populations is not fully understood. Here we address this problem by using an ab initio microscopic model of living cells, whose fitness is derived directly from their…

Molecular traits, such as gene expression levels or protein binding affinities, are increasingly accessible to quantitative measurement by modern high-throughput techniques. Such traits measure molecular functions and, from an evolutionary…

We are interested in the impact of natural selection in a prey-predator community. We introduce an individual-based model of the community that takes into account both prey and predator phenotypes. Our aim is to understand the phenotypic…

We analyze and reinterpret experimental evidence from the literature to argue for an ability of tumor cells to self-regulate their aneuploidy rate. We conjecture that this ability is mediated by a diversification factor that exploits…

In this work we develop a microscopic physical model of early evolution, where phenotype,organism life expectancy, is directly related to genotype, the stability of its proteins in their native conformations which can be determined exactly…

In evolution theory the concept of a fitness landscape has played an important role, evolution itself being portrayed as a hill-climbing process on a rugged landscape. In this article it is shown that in general, in the presence of other…

Genetically identical cells in the same population can take on phenotypically variable states, leading to differentiated responses to external signals, such as nutrients and drug-induced stress. Many models and experiments have focused on a…

We study a simple model of DNA evolution in a growing population of cells. Each cell contains a nucleotide sequence which randomly mutates at cell division. Cells divide according to a branching process. Following typical parameter values…

The observation that phenotypic variability is ubiquitous in isogenic populations has led to a multitude of experimental and theoretical studies seeking to probe the causes and consequences of this variability. Whether it be in the context…

Plasticity-led evolution is a form of evolution where a change in the environment induces novel traits via phenotypic plasticity, after which the novel traits are genetically accommodated over generations under the novel environment. This…

Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…

Under constant selection, each trait has a fixed fitness, and small mutation rates allow populations to efficiently exploit the optimal trait. Therefore it is reasonable to expect mutation rates will evolve downwards. However, we find this…

The long-term growth rate of populations in varying environments quantifies the evolutionary value of processing the information that biological individuals inherit from their ancestors and acquire from their environment. Previous models…

We investigate two stochastic models of a growing population subject to selection and mutation. In our models each individual carries a fitness which determines its mean offspring number. Many of these offspring inherit their parent's…

A tumor can be thought of as an ecosystem, which critically means that we cannot just consider it as a collection of mutated cells but more as a complex system of many interacting cellular and microenvironmental elements. At its simplest, a…

Recent work on mutation-selection models has revealed that, under specific assumptions on the fitness function and the mutation rates, asymptotic estimates for the leading eigenvalue of the mutation-reproduction matrix may be obtained…

The applicability of computational and dynamical systems models to organisms is scrutinized, using examples from developmental biology and cognition. Developmental morphogenesis is dependent on the inherent material properties of developing…

Many applications of machine learning methods involve an iterative protocol in which data are collected, a model is trained, and then outputs of that model are used to choose what data to consider next. For example, one data-driven approach…

This work presents a population genetic model of evolution, which includes haploid selection, mutation, recombination, and drift. The mutation-selection equilibrium can be expressed exactly in closed form for arbitrary fitness functions…