No Arabic abstract
This chapter gives a synopsis of recent approaches to model and analyse the evolution of microbial populations under selection. The first part reviews two population genetic models of Lenskis long-term evolution experiment with Escherichia coli, where models aim at explaining the observed curve of the evolution of the mean fitness. The second part describes a model of a host-pathogen system where the population of pathogenes experiences balancing selection, migration, and mutation, as motivated by observations of the genetic diversity of HCMV (the human cytomegalovirus) across hosts.
In exponentially proliferating populations of microbes, the population typically doubles at a rate less than the average doubling time of a single-cell due to variability at the single-cell level. It is known that the distribution of generation times obtained from a single lineage is, in general, insufficient to determine a populations growth rate. Is there an explicit relationship between observables obtained from a single lineage and the population growth rate? We show that a populations growth rate can be represented in terms of averages over isolated lineages. This lineage representation is related to a large deviation principle that is a generic feature of exponentially proliferating populations. Due to the large deviation structure of growing populations, the number of lineages needed to obtain an accurate estimate of the growth rate depends exponentially on the duration of the lineages, leading to a non-monotonic convergence of the estimate, which we verify in both synthetic and experimental data sets.
Recently, the selection-recombination equation with a single selected site and an arbitrary number of neutral sites was solved by means of the ancestral selection-recombination graph. Here, we introduce a more accessible approach, namely the ancestral initiation graph. The construction is based on a discretisation of the selection-recombination equation. We apply our method to systematically explain a long-standing observation concerning the dynamics of linkage disequilibrium between two neutral loci hitchhiking along with a selected one. In particular, this clarifies the nontrivial dependence on the position of the selected site.
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
We investigate a continuous time, probability measure-valued dynamical system that describes the process of mutation-selection balance in a context where the population is infinite, there may be infinitely many loci, and there are weak assumptions on selective costs. Our model arises when we incorporate very general recombination mechanisms into a previous model of mutation and selection from Steinsaltz, Evans and Wachter (2005) and take the relative strength of mutation and selection to be sufficiently small. The resulting dynamical system is a flow of measures on the space of loci. Each such measure is the intensity measure of a Poisson random measure on the space of loci: the points of a realization of the random measure record the set of loci at which the genotype of a uniformly chosen individual differs from a reference wild type due to an accumulation of ancestral mutations. Our motivation for working in such a general setting is to provide a basis for understanding mutation-driven changes in age-specific demographic schedules that arise from the complex interaction of many genes, and hence to develop a framework for understanding the evolution of aging. We establish the existence and uniqueness of the dynamical system, provide conditions for the existence and stability of equilibrium states, and prove that our continuous-time dynamical system is the limit of a sequence of discrete-time infinite population mutation-selection-recombination models in the standard asymptotic regime where selection and mutation are weak relative to recombination and both scale at the same infinitesimal rate in the limit.