No Arabic abstract
We introduce a new Wright-Fisher type model for seed banks incorporating simultaneous switching, which is motivated by recent work on microbial dormancy. We show that the simultaneous switching mechanism leads to a new jump-diffusion limit for the scaled frequency processes, extending the classical Wright-Fisher and seed bank diffusion limits. We further establish a new dual coalescent structure with multiple activation and deactivation events of lineages. While this seems reminiscent of multiple merger events in general exchangeable coalescents, it actually leads to an entirely new class of coalescent processes with unique qualitative and quantitative behaviour. To illustrate this, we provide a novel kind of condition for coming down from infinity for these coalescents using recent results of Griffiths.
Duality plays an important role in population genetics. It can relate results from forwards-in-time models of allele frequency evolution with those of backwards-in-time genealogical models; a well known example is the duality between the Wright-Fisher diffusion for genetic drift and its genealogical counterpart, the coalescent. There have been a number of articles extending this relationship to include other evolutionary processes such as mutation and selection, but little has been explored for models also incorporating crossover recombination. Here, we derive from first principles a new genealogical process which is dual to a Wright-Fisher diffusion model of drift, mutation, and recombination. Our approach is based on expressing a putative duality relationship between two models via their infinitesimal generators, and then seeking an appropriate test function to ensure the validity of the duality equation. This approach is quite general, and we use it to find dualities for several important variants, including both a discrete L-locus model of a gene and a continuous model in which mutation and recombination events are scattered along the gene according to continuous distributions. As an application of our results, we derive a series expansion for the transition function of the diffusion. Finally, we study in further detail the case in which mutation is absent. Then the dual process describes the dispersal of ancestral genetic material across the ancestors of a sample. The stationary distribution of this process is of particular interest; we show how duality relates this distribution to haplotype fixation probabilities. We develop an efficient method for computing such probabilities in multilocus models.
We consider a population constituted by two types of individuals; each of them can produce offspring in two different islands (as a particular case the islands can be interpreted as active or dormant individuals). We model the evolution of the popula
Computational inference of dated evolutionary histories relies upon various hypotheses about RNA, DNA, and protein sequence mutation rates. Using mutation rates to infer these dated histories is referred to as molecular clock assumption. Coalescent theory is a popular class of evolutionary models that implements the molecular clock hypothesis to facilitate computational inference of dated phylogenies. Cancer and virus evolution are two areas where these methods are particularly important. Methodologically, phylogenetic inference methods require a tree space over which the inference is performed, and geometry of this space plays an important role in statistical and computational aspects of tree inference algorithms. It has recently been shown that molecular clock, and hence coalescent, trees possess a unique geometry, different from that of classical phylogenetic tree spaces which do not model mutation rates. Here we introduce and study a space of discrete coalescent trees, that is, we assume that time is discrete, which is inevitable in many computational formalisations. We establish several geometrical properties of the space and show how these properties impact various algorithms used in phylogenetic analyses. Our tree space is a discretisation of a known time tree space, called t-space, and hence our results can be used to approximate solutions to various open problems in t-space. Our tree space is also a generalisation of another known trees space, called the ranked nearest neighbour interchange space, hence our advances in this paper imply new and generalise existing results about ranked trees.
We show how to analytically derive the average sequence dissimilarity (ASD) within and between species under a simplified multi-species coalescent setup.
We investigate the compact interface property in a recently introduced variant of the stochastic heat equation that incorporates dormancy, or equivalently seed banks. There individuals can enter a dormant state during which they are no longer subject to spatial dispersal and genetic drift. This models a state of low metabolic activity as found in microbial species. Mathematically, one obtains a memory effect since mass accumulated by the active population will be retained for all times in the seed bank. This raises the question whether the introduction of a seed bank into the system leads to a qualitatively different behaviour of a possible interface. Here, we aim to show that nevertheless in the stochastic heat equation with seed bank compact interfaces are retained through all times in both the active and dormant population. We use duality and a comparison argument with partial functional differential equations to tackle technical difficulties that emerge due to the lack of the martingale property of our solutions which was crucial in the classical non seed bank case.