2020/02/29 by Ami Taitelbaum, Robert West, Michael Assaf +1 · 1 citation
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Mathematics · Medicine · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Biological system #Biology #Carrying capacity #Demography #Dynamics (music) #Ecology #Evolution and Genetic Dynamics #Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation #Fixation (population genetics) #Mathematical and Theoretical Epidemiology and Ecology Models #Mathematics #Physics #Population #Statistical physics #Statistics #Stochastic process #cond-mat.stat-mech #nlin.AO #physics.bio-ph #q-bio.PE
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.125.048105
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 048105 (2020) · 22 pages, 7 figures: main text (6 pages, 3 figures) followed by Supplementary Material (16 pages, 4 figures). Published in Physical Review Letters. Additional supporting resources available at https://figshare.com/articles/Supplementary_Material/12613370
openalex publication_date 2020/07/24 · arxiv created 2020/07/27 · arxiv updated 2020/07/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Environmental changes greatly influence the evolution of populations. Here, we study the dynamics of a population of two strains, one growing slightly faster than the other, competing for resources in a time-varying binary environment modeled by a carrying capacity switching either randomly or periodically between states of abundance and scarcity. The population dynamics is characterized by demographic noise (birth and death events) coupled to a varying environment. We elucidate the similarities and differences of the evolution subject to a stochastically and periodically varying environment. Importantly, the population size distribution is generally found to be broader under intermediate and fast random switching than under periodic variations, which results in markedly different asymptotic behaviors between the fixation probability of random and periodic switching. We also determine the detailed conditions under which the fixation probability of the slow strain is maximal.