Does Good Mutation Help You Live Longer?

We consider a supercritical branching population, where individuals have i.i.d. lifetime durations (which are not necessarily exponentially distributed) and give birth (singly) at constant rate. We assume that individuals independently experience neutral mutations, at constant rate $\theta$ during their lifetimes, under the infinite-alleles assumption: each mutation instantaneously confers a brand new type, called allele or haplotype, to its carrier. The type carried by a mot...

In large asexual populations, multiple beneficial mutations arise in the population, compete, interfere with each other, and accumulate on the same genome, before any of them fix. The resulting dynamics, although studied by many authors, is still not fully understood, fundamentally because the effects of fluctuations due to the small numbers of the fittest individuals are large even in enormous populations. In this paper, branching processes and various asymptotic methods for...

The environment in which a population evolves can have a crucial impact on selection. We study evolutionary dynamics in finite populations of fixed size in a changing environment. The population dynamics are driven by birth and death events. The rates of these events may vary in time depending on the state of the environment, which follows an independent Markov process. We develop a general theory for the fixation probability of a mutant in a population of wild-types, and for...

We consider the evolution of large but finite populations on arbitrary fitness landscapes. We describe the evolutionary process by a Markov, Moran process. We show that to $\mathcal O(1/N)$, the time-averaged fitness is lower for the finite population than it is for the infinite population. We also show that fluctuations in the number of individuals for a given genotype can be proportional to a power of the inverse of the mutation rate. Finally, we show that the probability f...

This article is a presentation of specific recent results describing scaling limits of individual-based models. Thanks to them, we wish to relate the time-scales typical of demographic dynamics and natural selection to the parameters of the individual-based models. Although these results are by no means exhaustive, both on the mathematical and the biological level, they complement each other. Indeed, they provide a viewpoint for many classical time-scales. Namely, they encomp...

In this paper we consider a generalization to the asexual version of the Penna model for biological aging, where we take a continuous time limit. The genotype associated to each individual is an interval of real numbers over which Dirac $\delta$--functions are defined, representing genetically programmed diseases to be switched on at defined ages of the individual life. We discuss two different continuous limits for the evolution equation and two different mutation protocols,...

In this paper, we study the asymptotic (large time) behavior of a selection-mutation-competition model for a population structured with respect to a phenotypic trait, when the rate of mutation is very small. We assume that the reproduction is asexual, and that the mutations can be described by a linear integral operator. We are interested in the interplay between the time variable $t$ and the rate $\varepsilon$ of mutations. We show that depending on $\alpha > 0$, the limit $...

In this paper, we review recent results of ours concerning branching processes with general lifetimes and neutral mutations, under the infinitely many alleles model, where mutations can occur either at birth of individuals or at a constant rate during their lives. In both models, we study the allelic partition of the population at time t. We give closed formulae for the expected frequency spectrum at t and prove pathwise convergence to an explicit limit, as t goes to infini...

W. D. Hamilton's celebrated formula for the age-specific force of natural selection furnishes predictions for senescent mortality due to mutation accumulation, at the price of reliance on a linear approximation. Applying to Hamilton's setting the full non-linear demographic model for mutation accumulation of Evans et al. (2007), we find surprising differences. Non-linear interactions cause the collapse of Hamilton-style predictions in the most commonly studied case, refine pr...

r-selection refers to evolutionary competition in the rate of a population's exponential increase. This is contrasted with K-selection, in which populations in steady-state compete in efficiency of resource conversion. Evolution in nature is thought to combine these two in various proportions. But in modeling the evolution of life histories, theorists have used r-selection exclusively; up until now, there has not been a practical algorithm for computing the target function of...