Related papers: Finite genome size can halt Muller's ratchet
Non-African populations have experienced major bottlenecks in the time since their split from West Africans, which has led to the hypothesis that natural selection to remove weakly deleterious mutations may have been less effective in…
Darwin introduced the concept of the "living fossil" to describe species belonging to lineages that have experienced little evolutionary change, and suggested that species in more slowly evolving lineages are more prone to extinction (1).…
We introduce a new coordination problem in distributed computing that we call the population stability problem. A system of agents each with limited memory and communication, as well as the ability to replicate and self-destruct, is…
Populations evolving under the joint influence of recombination and resampling (traditionally known as genetic drift) are investigated. First, we summarise and adapt a deterministic approach, as valid for infinite populations, which assumes…
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…
We study the asymptotic behavior of solutions of the Cauchy problem associated to a quantitative genetics model with a sexual mode of reproduction. It combines trait-dependent mortality and a nonlinear integral reproduction operator "the…
The formation of dynamical clusters of proteins is ubiquitous in cellular membranes and is in part regulated by the recycling of membrane components. Mean-field models of out-of-equilibrium cluster formation with recycling predict a broad…
We consider a fitness-structured population model with competition and migration between nearest neighbors. Under a combination of large population and rare migration limits we are particularly interested in the asymptotic behavior of the…
We present an elementary model of random size varying population given by a stationary continuous state branching process. For this model we compute the joint distribution of: the time to the most recent common ancestor, the size of the…
Selection, mutation and random drift affect the dynamics of allele frequencies and consequently of quantitative traits. While the macroscopic dynamics of quantitative traits can be measured, the underlying allele frequencies are typically…
Biological systems have evolved to amazingly complex states, yet we do not understand in general how evolution operates to generate increasing genetic and functional complexity. Molecular recognition sites are short genome segments or…
We study the evolution of asexual microorganisms with small mutation rate in fluctuating environments, and develop techniques that allow us to expand the formal solution of the evolution equations to first order in the mutation rate. Our…
The question as to why most higher organisms reproduce sexually has remained open despite extensive research, and has been called "the queen of problems in evolutionary biology". Theories dating back to Weismann have suggested that the key…
Mutations can arise from the chance misincorporation of nucleotides during DNA replication or from DNA lesions that are not repaired correctly. We introduce a model that relates the source of mutations to their accumulation with cell…
Single-cell experiments revealed substantial variability in generation times, growth rates but also in birth and division sizes between genetically identical cells. Understanding how these fluctuations determine the fitness of the…
We consider a model of a population with fixed size $N$, which is subjected to an unlimited supply of beneficial mutations at a constant rate $\mu_N$. Individuals with $k$ beneficial mutations have the fitness $(1+s_N)^k$. Each individual…
Selective sweeps are typically associated with a local reduction of genetic diversity around the adaptive site. However, selective sweeps can also quickly carry neutral mutations to observable population frequencies if they arise early in a…
We have analysed the possibility of scaling the sexual Penna ageing model. Assuming that the number of genes expressed before the reproduction age grows linearly with the genome size and that the mutation rate per genome and generation is…
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…
Various genome evolutionary models have been proposed these last decades to predict the evolution of a DNA sequence over time, essentially described using a mutation matrix. By essence, all of these models relate the evolution of DNA…