Related papers: Gene surfing
Many theoretical and experimental studies suggest that range expansions can have severe consequences for the gene pool of the expanding population. Due to strongly enhanced genetic drift at the advancing frontier, neutral and weakly…
Range expansion and range shifts are crucial population responses to climate change. Genetic consequences are not well understood but are clearly coupled to ecological dynamics that, in turn, are driven by shifting climate conditions. We…
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…
Natural populations often show enhanced genetic drift consistent with a strong skew in their offspring number distribution. The skew arises because the variability of family sizes is either inherently strong or amplified by population…
When biological populations expand into new territory, the evolutionary outcomes can be strongly influenced by genetic drift, the random fluctuations in allele frequencies. Meanwhile, spatial variability in the environment can also…
Theory predicts rapid genetic drift during invasions, yet many expanding populations maintain high genetic diversity. We find that genetic drift is dramatically suppressed when dispersal rates increase with the population density because…
We investigate the nature of genetic drift acting at the leading edge of range expansions, building on recent results in [Hallatschek et al., Proc.\ Natl.\ Acad.\ Sci., \textbf{104}(50): 19926 - 19930 (2007)]. A well mixed population of two…
Recent microbial experiments suggest that enhanced genetic drift at the frontier of a two-dimensional range expansion can cause genetic sectoring patterns with fractal domain boundaries. Here, we propose and analyze a simple model of…
Human populations have a complex history of introgression and of changing population size. Human genetic variation has been affected by both these processes, so that inference of past population size depends upon the pattern of gene flow…
In subdivided populations, migration acts together with selection and genetic drift and determines their evolution. Building up on a recently proposed method, which hinges on the emergence of a time scale separation between local and global…
Understanding the temporal spread of gene drive alleles -- alleles that bias their own transmission -- through modeling is essential before any field experiments. In this paper, we present a deterministic reaction-diffusion model describing…
Standard neutral population genetics theory with a strictly fixed population size has important limitations. An alternative model that allows independently fluctuating population sizes and reproduces the standard neutral evolution is…
The expansion of a population into new habitat is a transient process that leaves its footprints in the genetic composition of the expanding population. How the structure of the environment shapes the population front and the evolutionary…
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.…
The dynamics of adaptation is difficult to predict because it is highly stochastic even in large populations. The uncertainty emerges from number fluctuations, called genetic drift, arising in the small number of particularly fit…
Resource are often not uniformly distributed within a population. Spatial variations of concentration of a resource, change the fitness of competing strategies locally. The notion of fitness varying with respect to both genotype and…
Heterogeneities in environmental conditions often induce corresponding heterogeneities in the distribution of species. In the extreme case of a localized patch of increased growth rates, reproducing populations can become strongly…
We introduce a broad class of spatial models to describe how spatially heterogeneous populations live, die, and reproduce. Individuals are represented by points of a point measure, whose birth and death rates can depend both on spatial…
Theoretical descriptions of the stepping-stone model, a cornerstone of spatial population genetics, have long overlooked diffusive noise arising from migration dynamics. We derive an exact fluctuating hydrodynamic description of this model…
Organisms often grow, migrate and compete in liquid environments, as well as on solid surfaces. However, relatively little is known about what happens when competing species are mixed and compressed by fluid turbulence. In these lectures we…