Related papers: Gene surfing
Tests of the neutral evolution hypothesis are usually built on the standard null model which assumes that mutations are neutral and population size remains constant over time. However, it is unclear how such tests are affected if the last…
Traveling fronts describe the transition between two alternative states in a great number of physical and biological systems. Examples include the spread of beneficial mutations, chemical reactions, and the invasions by foreign species. In…
We consider a family of models describing the evolution under selection of a population whose dynamics can be related to the propagation of noisy traveling waves. For one particular model, that we shall call the exponential model, the…
We study fixation probabilities and times as a consequence of neutral genetic drift in subdivided populations, motivated by a model of the cultural evolutionary process of language change that is described by the same mathematics as the…
Increasing evidence of the effects of changing climate on physical ocean conditions and long-term changes in fish populations adds to the need to understand the effects of stochastic forcing on marine populations. Cohort resonance is of…
Environment plays a fundamental role in the competition for resources, and hence in the evolution of populations. Here, we study a well-mixed, finite population consisting of two strains competing for the limited resources provided by an…
Some species exhibit very high levels of DNA sequence variability; there is also evidence for the existence of heritable epigenetic variants that experience state changes at a much higher rate than sequence variants. In both cases, the…
We are interested in populations in which the fitness of different genetic types fluctuates in time and space, driven by temporal and spatial fluctuations in the environment. For simplicity, our population is assumed to be composed of just…
In species reproducing both sexually and asexually clones are often more common in recently established populations. Earlier studies have suggested that this pattern arises from natural selection favouring asexual recruitment in young…
In large populations, multiple beneficial mutations may be simultaneously spreading. In asexual populations, these mutations must either arise on the same background or compete against each other. In sexual populations, recombination can…
The genetic diversity of a species is shaped by its recent evolutionary history and can be used to infer demographic events or selective sweeps. Most inference methods are based on the null hypothesis that natural selection is a weak or…
We investigate travelling wave solutions in reaction-diffusion models of animal range expansion in the case that population diffusion is density-dependent. We find that the speed of the selected wave depends critically on the strength of…
Population structure can be modelled by evolutionary graphs, which can have a substantial, but very subtle influence on the fate of the arising mutants. Individuals are located on the nodes of these graphs, competing with each other to…
Our models for detecting the effect of adaptation on population genomic diversity are often predicated on a single newly arisen mutation sweeping rapidly to fixation. However, a population can also adapt to a new situation by multiple…
Traveling waves are ubiquitous in nature and control the speed of many important dynamical processes, including chemical reactions, epidemic outbreaks, and biological evolution. Despite their fundamental role in complex systems, traveling…
We study a model of selection acting on a diploid population (one in which each individual carries two copies of each gene) living in one spatial dimension. We suppose a particular gene appears in two forms (alleles) $A$ and $a$, and that…
Convergence of discrete-time Markov chains with two timescales is a powerful tool to study stochastic evolutionary games in subdivided populations. Focusing on linear games within demes, convergence to a diffusion process for the strategy…
Human populations have experienced dramatic growth since the Neolithic revolution. Recent studies that sequenced a very large number of individuals observed an extreme excess of rare variants, and provided clear evidence of recent rapid…
Migrations have played an important role in shaping the genetic diversity of human populations. Understanding genomic data thus requires careful modeling of historical gene flow. Here we consider the effect of relatively recent population…
The dynamics of well-mixed biological populations is usually studied by mean-field methods and weak-noise expansions. Similar methods have been applied also in spatially extended problems, relying on the fact that these populations are…