2004/01/20 by Yisroel Brumer, Eugene I. Shakhnovich · 11 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Medicine · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Biology #Coevolution #Computer science #Evolution and Genetic Dynamics #Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation #Evolutionary biology #Gene #Genetics #Genome #Host (biology) #Mathematical and Theoretical Epidemiology and Ecology Models #Mutation #Mutation rate #Parasite hosting #Viral quasispecies #cond-mat.soft #q-bio.PE
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreve.69.061909
published in Physical Review E 69(6), 061909 (American Physical Society)
arxiv created 2004/01/20 · openalex publication_date 2004/06/04 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
In this paper, we extend a model of host-parasite coevolution to incorporate the semiconservative nature of DNA replication for both the host and the parasite. We find that the optimal mutation rate for the semiconservative and conservative hosts converge for realistic genome lengths, thus maintaining the admirable agreement between theory and experiment found previously for the conservative model and justifying the conservative approximation in some cases. We demonstrate that, while the optimal mutation rate for a conservative and semiconservative parasite interacting with a given immune system is similar to that of a conservative parasite, the properties away from this optimum differ significantly. We suspect that this difference, coupled with the requirement that a parasite optimize survival in a range of viable hosts, may help explain why semiconservative viruses are known to have significantly lower mutation rates than their conservative counterparts.