Related papers: Gene surfing
Biological organisms have to cope with stochastic variations in both the external environment and the internal population dynamics. Theoretical studies and laboratory experiments suggest that population diversification could be an effective…
While Neutral Theory famously describes the number of discrete genetic differences in populations, we consider the number of genetic backgrounds under which such differences are observed - setting limits to the generalizability of their…
We study competition between two biological species advected by a compressible velocity field. Individuals are treated as discrete Lagrangian particles that reproduce or die in a density-dependent fashion. In the absence of a velocity field…
Recent methods have been developed to map single-cell lineage statistics to population growth. Because population growth selects for exponentially rare phenotypes, these methods inherently depend on sampling large deviations from finite…
Demographic models built from genetic data play important roles in illuminating prehistorical events and serving as null models in genome scans for selection. We introduce an inference method based on the joint frequency spectrum of genetic…
Identifying drivers of complex traits from the noisy signals of genetic variation obtained from high throughput genome sequencing technologies is a central challenge faced by human geneticists today. We hypothesize that the variants…
Environmental variations can significantly influence how populations compete for resources, and hence shape their evolution. Here, we study population dynamics subject to a fluctuating environment modeled by a varying carrying capacity…
Mathematical modelling of the evolution of the size-spectrum dynamics in aquatic ecosystems was discovered to be a powerful tool to have a deeper insight into impacts of human- and environmental driven changes on the marine ecosystem. In…
Many imaging techniques for biological systems -- like fixation of cells coupled with fluorescence microscopy -- provide sharp spatial resolution in reporting locations of individuals at a single moment in time but also destroy the dynamics…
It is becoming routine to obtain datasets on DNA sequence variation across several thousands of chromosomes, providing unprecedented opportunity to infer the underlying biological and demographic forces. Such data make it vital to study…
The biological theory of adaptive dynamics proposes a description of the long-term evolution of a structured asexual population. It is based on the assumptions of large population, rare mutations and small mutation steps, that lead to a…
Understanding the influence of an environment on the evolution of its resident population is a major challenge in evolutionary biology. Great progress has been made in homogeneous population structures while heterogeneous structures have…
Wave propagation in time-varying media enables unique control of energy transport by breaking energy conservation through temporal modulation. Among the resulting phenomena, temporal disorder-random fluctuations in material parameters-can…
Dispersal of species to find a more favorable habitat is important in population dynamics. Dispersal rates evolve in response to the relative success of different dispersal strategies. In a simplified deterministic treatment (J. Dockery, V.…
A fundamental problem in the fields of population genetics, evolution, and community ecology, is the fate of a single mutant, or invader, introduced in a finite population of wild types. For a fixed-size community of $N$ individuals, with…
We investigate the dynamics of unidirectional semi-infinite chains of type-I oscillators that are periodically forced at their root node, as an archetype of wave generation in neural networks. In previous studies, numerical simulations…
Complex spatial structure, with partially isolated subpopulations, and environment heterogeneity, such as gradients in nutrients, oxygen, and drugs, both shape the evolution of natural populations. We investigate the impact of environment…
Collective behaviour in biological systems pitches us against theoretical challenges way beyond the borders of ordinary statistical physics. The lack of concepts like scaling and renormalization is particularly grievous, as it forces us to…
We use traveling-wave theory to derive expressions for the rate of accumulation of deleterious mutations under Muller's ratchet and the speed of adaptation under positive selection in asexual populations. Traveling-wave theory is a…
The abundance of a species' population in an ecosystem is rarely stationary, often exhibiting large fluctuations over time. Using historical data on marine species, we show that the year-to-year fluctuations of population growth rate obey a…